What do chef interviews actually test?

Who you're actually talking to

For a chef de partie or demi chef role, you're usually talking to the head chef or sous chef, sometimes both, sometimes with the general manager sitting in for the last five minutes to talk about tips and rota. In smaller independent kitchens it might just be the owner-chef, in which case the interview and the trail often happen on the same day because they don't have time to run two separate processes.

For a sous chef or head chef role, expect the head chef or executive chef first, then a second conversation with someone above the kitchen — a GM, an operations manager, sometimes an owner or director. That second conversation is rarely about food. It's about whether you can run a P&L, manage a rota across sections, and not walk out mid-season. Don't mistake it for a courtesy chat; it's where head chef offers get lost as often as in the tasting.

What almost never happens: a chef role decided purely on a conversation in an office. If nobody has mentioned a trail, a trail shift, or a practical task by the second conversation, ask about it yourself. Its absence is either a sign the kitchen is desperate to fill a shift, or a sign they've already decided from your CV and the interview is a formality — worth knowing which before you commit to a start date.

The trail, and what it's actually checking

The trail (also called a stage, trial shift, or working interview) is the part that matters most and gets the least explanation beforehand. You'll usually be asked to come in for a service — sometimes paid, sometimes not, which is worth clarifying directly since practice varies a lot between kitchens and the law on this is genuinely unsettled. You'll be put on a section, sometimes your stated speciality, sometimes deliberately not, to see how you cope outside your comfort zone.

What's being watched isn't really your knife skills in isolation. It's:

• Mise en place discipline — do you set up your section properly before service, or are you still prepping veg when the first docket comes in.
• Pace under a real ticket rail, not a quiet Tuesday lunch. Anyone can plate one dish well. The trail is testing what happens at six dockets deep, in the weeds, with the pass shouting times.
• Communication with the pass — do you call dishes back, confirm times, flag when you're running behind before it becomes a problem, or go quiet and hope it works out.
• Cleanliness and section discipline — wiping down as you go, rotating stock FIFO, not cross-contaminating boards, because a head chef watching you cook is also silently doing an EHO's job in their head.
• How you take correction mid-service. A chef telling you to replate something isn't a personal attack; how you respond to it — silently redo it and move on, versus getting defensive or sulking — is one of the most watched moments of the whole trail.

A head chef who's done this a while can tell within twenty minutes whether someone has actually run a section under pressure or has only ever worked prep in a slower kitchen. There's no way to fake that on a CV, which is exactly why the trail exists.

The questions that aren't small talk

Some questions in the sit-down part sound casual but are doing real work. Here's what they're actually checking, and what a thin answer sounds like next to a real one.

"Talk me through your current mise en place." This is checking whether you actually understand your section, not whether you can describe a job title. A shallow answer lists ingredients — "I prep the fish, do the garnish, portion the meat." A real answer includes order and reasoning: what gets done first because it needs time (stocks, confits, anything braised), what gets done last because it degrades (herbs, anything dressed), and how much you batch versus prep to order based on covers. If you can't explain the order, it sounds like you've never actually owned a section — you've worked one.

"What would you do if you were down a commis on a Saturday night?" This isn't really about staffing. It's checking whether you understand that kitchens run on triage — what gets simplified, what gets dropped from the offer, what you communicate to the pass and front of house rather than just grinding through and letting times slip. A weak answer is "I'd just work harder." A real answer talks about simplifying garnish, batching more, and flagging to the head chef or manager early rather than late.

"How do you handle an allergen order?" Since Natasha's Law and the wider allergen rules under the Food Standards Agency's 14 major allergens, this question is close to mandatory in any UK kitchen interview, and it's genuinely testing knowledge, not conversation. A shallow answer says "I'd check the ticket and be careful." A real answer mentions a clean board and separate utensils, checking the allergen matrix rather than relying on memory, communicating the dish back to the pass and front of house, and — critically — saying no to a dish if you can't guarantee it's safe, rather than guessing. If someone can't name a concrete process here, that's a genuine red flag for a head chef, not just a weak answer.

"Tell me about a dish you've costed." Asked more at chef de partie level and above. This is checking whether you think about food beyond flavour — portion size, yield, GP percentage, whether a special was actually worth putting on. A shallow answer describes a dish. A real answer includes numbers: rough food cost as a percentage of sell price, or a decision you made to change a garnish or portion because the margin didn't work.

"What's the worst service you've had, and what happened?" This is a trap for people who blame everyone else. A shallow answer is a story where the speaker is the only competent person in the building. A real answer usually includes something the speaker got wrong — under-prepped, misjudged covers, didn't communicate soon enough — and what changed afterwards. Head chefs have run enough bad services themselves to know nobody escapes them clean; pretending otherwise reads as either inexperience or dishonesty.

What a shallow answer sounds like, more generally

Across all of this, the pattern in a weak answer is the same: it's generic enough to be about any kitchen, any section, any dish. "I'm a team player," "I work well under pressure," "I love food" — these could be said by someone who has never run a pass in their life. A head chef interviewing you has heard all of them and is listening past them for specifics: which section, which covers, which dish, which mistake, which correction. If your answer would survive being said about a completely different kitchen, it isn't actually answering the question.

The other tell is vocabulary that's slightly off — calling the pass "the counter," or talking about "portions" instead of covers, or not knowing what a docket is. It's a small thing, but in an industry built on shared shorthand, it reads instantly as someone who's watched kitchens rather than worked one.

What to do before the next one

Ask directly, before you accept an interview slot, whether there's a trail attached and whether it's paid — it tells you how the kitchen actually operates, not just what they say in the room. Before you go in, be ready to talk through your current section in the order you actually prep it, have one costed dish in your head with real numbers, and have an honest bad-service story with your own mistake in it, not just everyone else's. Those three things cover most of what's actually being tested, whichever head chef is asking.

If what's slowing you down is the applications never getting to interview stage at all, that's a different problem — jobmarket.pro reads the advert in full, tells you where your experience genuinely matches a specific section or cuisine and where it doesn't, and builds the application from your real history rather than generic phrasing.