Executive Chef

We’ve grown quickly, and the owner’s business partner has retired. A lot in this kitchen still sits with him; the menu, the prep, the stock, the chippy counter, the paperwork, and he’s past capacity. We’re now building the team and systems to take Arlecchino forward, and that’s where this role comes in.

You would own the food, the operation and service. Our Head Chef works the sections and would be alongside you.

If you want to turn up, cook a shift and go home, this isn’t the job. It’s the menu, the margin, the ordering and the rota as well as the pass. On a Friday night you’re the one holding it together, and the rest of the week you’re the one deciding what we sell and what it costs us.

Service. Calling the pass, the timing, the standard of what leaves the kitchen. Ours is a small team, so you’ll be cooking as well as running it.

The food
. Weekly specials, new dishes, seasonal changes, costings. Our core family recipes are the reason people have come here for sixty years and those stay as they are, but everything built around them would be yours.

Prep
. Planning it, organising it, and making sure the kitchen is set up properly before every service.

The chippy
. Our takeaway counter and the team on it, including serving customers directly ’d be one of the first faces our customers see coming through the door.

Suppliers and ordering
. Relationships, negotiation, ordering, deliveries, stock control.

Gross profit
. Costings, waste, portion discipline and margin.

People and hours
. Kitchen rotas, labour hours against sales, holiday and sickness cover, day‑to‑day organisation.

Systems
. Most of what we do still runs on paper and on memory. Getting us onto proper systems; ordering, stock, rotas, food safety records, is part of this job, and it’s yours to shape. You won’t be inheriting someone else’s setup.

Opening and closing
. The practical business of getting the doors open and shut properly.

Compliance
. Food safety records and hygiene documentation currently sit with the owner. You’d take this on gradually as you find your feet, and how it’s divided is something we’d work out between us rather than hand to you on day one.

Cooking is a real part of this job, roughly half to two thirds of your week. You need to hold your own on any station.

£38,000 – £40,600 per year, depending on experience. Reviewed at twelve months.

Room to grow
, and honesty about when. This salary reflects the job as described, taking enough off the owner’s plate to bring him from seventy hours a week down to fifty. That’s year one. Beyond that, as the structure you’ve built lets him step back further, the role gets bigger, and that’s the point at which the package gets revisited. We’d rather be straight about the sequence than vague about the promise.

48 hours a week and in a normal week you’ll have two consecutive days off. Holiday cover and the occasional stretch will mean that isn’t always possible.

28 days paid holiday including bank holidays.

Tips
. The team run and share their own tips between them; the business isn’t involved. They’re consistently well above what’s typical for the area, and the team will tell you straight what that actually comes to when you meet them.

Free meals on shift, 40% staff discount, workplace pension.

We haven’t set minimum requirements. No fixed number of years, no particular CV. We think you’ll know from reading the above whether this is your job, but roughly, here’s what we have in mind.

Experience enough that running a kitchen holds no surprises. Head Chef, Sous Chef, Kitchen Manager, or a route we haven’t thought of.

Menu and costing ability
. You can write a special, cost it properly, and make it work on a Tuesday as well…