Chef’s table NZ

  I've already written about whether culinary school is worth the money. Short version: it can help, but it's not the only door in. Plenty of chefs I've worked alongside — some of the best ones — never set foot in a culinary classroom. Here's the actual path, if school isn't the one you're taking. Step 1: Get in, any way you can Nobody starts as a chef. You start as a kitchen hand or commis, washing, prepping, watching. The title doesn't matter in year one. Getting inside a working kitchen does. Apply everywhere. Cafes, pubs, hotel kitchens, catering companies. Don't hold out for the fine-dining dream job on day one — you're not ready for it yet, and neither is your CV. Step 2: Show up early, leave late, ask questions This sounds simple because it is. Kitchens run on trust before they run on talent. The person who turns up fifteen minutes early and stays to help clean down gets taught things the person who clocks in at the buzzer never will. Ask a ch...

  People use these two words like they're interchangeable. In a kitchen, they're not even close. The short answer A cook prepares food. A chef runs a kitchen. Every chef can cook. Not every cook is a chef. That's the whole distinction, and almost everything else falls out of it. What a cook actually does A cook follows the recipe, the spec, the standard that's already been set. They come in, work their section, execute what's been decided, and go home. That's not an insult — a great cook who's fast, consistent, and reliable is worth their weight in gold to any kitchen. Most of the people keeping a busy service running are cooks, not chefs, and it should stay that way. What a chef actually does A chef decides what the standard is in the first place. Menu, costing, ordering, training the team, tasting every dish before it leaves, taking the call when something's wrong at 8pm on a Saturday. A chef is responsible for the kitchen, not just for their own secti...

 Every few weeks someone messages me asking the same thing: "I want to work in a New Zealand kitchen — should I come on a working holiday or try to get sponsored?" There's no shortage of visa guides online. Immigration lawyers, migration agencies, travel blogs — they'll all give you the dates, the fees, the age limits. What they won't tell you is what actually happens once you're standing in a kitchen with that visa in your pocket. That's the part I can help with. Why I don't hire working holiday visa holders I'll be straight with you, because nobody else will be: most head chefs I know, myself included, actively avoid hiring WHV holders. Here's why. Your visa gives you twelve months in the country, but I only get you for three, maybe six, before you're legally required to move on. Training a cook properly — getting them fast on a section, trusting them with service — takes longer than that. By the time you're actually useful, you'r...

  I get asked this more than almost anything else. Usually by someone standing at a fork in the road — finish school and go to culinary school, or do something "sensible" instead. I'm not going to give you a yes or no. I'm going to give you what nobody gave me. The honest cost side Long hours. Weekends gone. Christmas and New Year's Eve — some of the busiest nights of your working life, not your personal one. Your feet will hurt in ways you didn't know feet could hurt. You will get burned, cut, and yelled at, sometimes all in the same service. The pay, especially early on, will not reflect the effort. I've written before about what chefs actually earn in NZ — the short version is that the title looks better than the payslip for the first several years. Relationships take a hit too. Not everyone understands a partner who's never free on a Saturday night. The honest reward side There's a version of satisfaction you only get from finishing a service w...

  Every few months someone messages me the same question. Usually it's a young cook, sometimes it's a parent worried about their kid's career choice. "How much do chefs actually make?" Google will give you a number. It's not wrong, exactly. It's just not the whole story. The numbers you'll find Search it yourself and you'll land somewhere around these figures: Commis chef / entry level: close to minimum wage ($23.95 an hour as it stands), maybe a dollar or two above it Chef de partie: roughly $25–$29 an hour on average, based on current job listings and payroll data Sous chef: roughly $29–$34 an hour on average Head chef: roughly $35 up to $49+ an hour, depending on the venue and city — a head chef salary of $85,000–$100,000 a year works out to around $42–$48 an hour on a standard 40-hour week Average chef salary nationally: sits somewhere in the mid-$70,000s to low $80,000s a year Those numbers are real. They come from job listings and payroll sur...

  Walk into any kitchen and I can tell you roughly how it's run before anyone says a word to me. Not because I'm gifted. Because after twenty years, the signs are always the same. The first thing I look at isn't the food It's the floor. Not for dirt — for how people move on it. Are people walking around each other with intent, or are they bumping into each other? A kitchen with a good rhythm has people who know exactly where everyone else is without looking. A kitchen in trouble has people colliding, apologising, resetting. The sound tells you more than the sight Before I look at anything, I listen. A healthy kitchen has a certain hum — pans going down with purpose, calls being answered immediately, not repeated three times. A kitchen under strain sounds different. Calls hang in the air. Someone's voice gets sharper than it needs to be. Silence in the wrong place — no chatter, no calls, nobody communicating — is often worse than noise. Silence usually means people h...

  Every hospitality job ad says it. "Must be passionate about food." "Looking for passionate individuals." It's on every listing, every careers page, every induction pack. And every time I read it, I think the same thing: passion is not what gets you through a Saturday double. I'm not saying passion doesn't matter. It does, somewhere in there. But it's not the thing doing the actual work, and pretending it is has done real damage to how this industry treats people. Passion doesn't survive contact with a bad shift.  is what gets you into the industry. It's the reason you signed up for culinary school, or took that first kitchen job instead of something easier. It's real, and it matters at the start. But passion doesn't clean the grill trap at 1am. It doesn't stand you back up after you've burned your forearm and there's still two hours of service left. It doesn't get you through the fifth split shift in a row when you...

  People throw the word "chef" around like it just means someone who cooks well. It doesn't. Cooking well gets you in the door. Running a section is a completely different skill, and almost nobody explains it properly before you're standing there on your first solo shift wondering why you're drowning. I want to break down what actually changes when you go from "cook who's good at their job" to "person responsible for a section," because the gap is bigger than most people expect. Cooking and running a section are different jobs. When you're a junior, your job is simple: execute the dish in front of you, well, on time. That's hard enough on its own. But running a section means you're not just cooking anymore — you're managing a system. You're tracking six, eight, ten dishes at different stages simultaneously, predicting when tickets are going to stack, and adjusting before it becomes a problem instead of after. The cooking...

  Somewhere along the way, hospitality decided that exhaustion was a badge of honour. Sixty-hour weeks, no breaks, standing on your feet until your back gives out — and somehow the person who complains about it is the "weak" one, not the system that built it that way. I'm not writing this to be dramatic. I'm writing it because I've watched good cooks — genuinely talented ones — quit the industry entirely before they turned 30. Not because they couldn't cook. Because nobody ever taught them how to survive the job long enough to get good at it. Burnout doesn't look like collapsing. Most people picture burnout as some dramatic breakdown — crying in the walk-in, storming out mid-service. That's not what it usually looks like. Usually it's quieter than that. It's a chef who used to care about plating now just getting through the pass. It's someone who used to ask questions on their day off now just wanting to sleep through it. It's the slow ...