Chefs Career Advice from Tom Brown, Head Chef, Outlaws in Rock

Chef Career Advice

Based on his extensive experience working within the Culinary Industry, Head Chef, Tom Brown offers his advice to aspiring Chefs in an attempt to help them on their journey up the career ladder:

The advice I'd give to young Chefs in the industry is aim high always aim high get the best job you can as early as you can and never work anything less than 100 % always work as hard as possible.

The only prerequisite of being a Chef is that you have to work hard, you don't have to have anything else as long as you’re willing to adapt and work hard that's all you need to do well in the industry.

A young Chef from this industry can expect long hours a lot of long hours, learning new skills every day, really the UK is great for food at the moment there's a lot of interesting places and they can just expect to learn lots and see lots of new things and get a really good job satisfaction from the amazing things that they will see.

The best bit of careers advice I have ever been given was by my old boss Paul Ripley and he said to me it doesn't matter what you do in life, it doesn't matter whether your cooking food or cleaning a toilet, doing anything just do whatever you can to the best of your abilities.

I'm looking for passion mostly a good attitude someone that's going to push themselves and try and sort of raise their game to the standards that we set. I wouldn't expect anyone to work any less hard than anyone else who already works here. A young Chef can expect from a career in Nathan Outlaw to learn new skills every single day, they'll see some of the best produce available in the UK they'll certainly learn a lot about fish.

There are great opportunities for you obviously, we do everything that we can to build these Chefs and to give them a good platform to go on in the industry so yeah a lot of education in the industry I suppose you could say.

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