About This Role
Leading the kitchen at Ponto Lounge, a local café bar, is the core of this full-time Head Chef position. The role involves hands-on cooking, team building, and managing the kitchen to ensure high standards and customer satisfaction. It suits an experienced hospitality head chef, kitchen manager, or senior sous chef looking for career progression.
Responsibilities
- Take full ownership of the kitchen at Ponto Lounge, leading every shift from open to close, ensuring proper staffing and consistent food standards
- Recruit, develop, and coach the kitchen team at all levels, providing honest feedback and clear development plans
- Know menu specifications and kitchen processes thoroughly, identifying issues and opportunities proactively to ensure every dish meets standards
- Own a site-level action plan with the General Manager covering food wait times, NSF standards, ordering, stock counts, and cleaning
- Deliver on kitchen KPIs, including food quality, wait times, wastage, food safety, and GP, and report on performance after every shift
- Schedule fair rotas in line with sales and bookings forecasts, ensuring each shift has the right skill and capability to run smoothly
- Work closely with the front of house team to build a genuine one-team culture, with shared understanding and cross-training
Requirements
- A natural people leader who builds loyal, motivated kitchen teams and fosters a one-team culture between kitchen and front of house
- A cook who genuinely cares about working with fresh, high-quality ingredients, knows menu specs, and strives for excellence
- A kitchen leader who leads from the line and pass, coaches in the moment, and obsesses over details to help team members grow
- Commercially minded, confident with GP, labour, stock, wastage, and food safety KPIs, using them to make smart decisions
- Experienced and adaptable, with prior experience as a Head Chef, Kitchen Manager, or Sous Chef ready for the next step
- Comfortable recruiting, training, and developing kitchen teams
- Happy running a busy service and reviewing performance with an Operations Chef
Benefits
- Bonus
- Overtime pay for every hour worked
- Achievable bonus scheme, paid twice a year
- Tips shared equally across the team, based on hours worked
- Free meal on every shift no matter the length
- Christmas and Boxing Day off
- Genuine career development with in-house training courses and ‘Future Ops’ development programmes
- 50% discount on food and drinks from day one, including alcohol across all brands (Lounge, Cosy Club, & Brightside)
- Staff party — Loungefest