How To Become a Vegan Chef
Now is a great time to become a vegan chef. The industry is booming with vegan cafes, restaurants and caterers popping up like mushrooms in September. But there is a lack of vegan chefs. Employers are seeking vegan chefs who are both passionate and trained. Better still if the chef also has experience. The first two attributes (passion and training) are the most important, experience is the icing on the (vegan) cake.
But how do you become a vegan chef? How do you get to the point of feeling comfortable and confident enough to put on that godly cloak that is a chef's jacket and strut into a professional kitchen with confidence? I know how confusing it can be, I was in your shoes once upon a time. I didn’t know how to have a career as a vegan chef. I didn’t know what training I needed or where to find it, I didn’t know what my career options were. I only knew one thing - I HAD to be a vegan chef. It took me years of research and trial and error to forge a career as a vegan chef. And now, with my years of experience I can help you.
Do you really want this….?
The first thing you need to address is your desire to work in food. Being a chef (whether you’re a private chef, a restaurant chef or a large-scale caterer) is a sweaty, physically demanding job. It is not glamorous. This is a fact that aspiring chefs should fully understand. It is a completely different experience to making dinner for your friends. The pace in professional kitchens is often very quick. Your body will ache in places it has never ached before. This is a test, a test of how much you want this life. You need to know that the love you have for sharing food whilst also promoting veganism can pull you through. You need that raison d’etre, that fundamental need at your core. There will be times when you are exhausted, stressed, sore. Cheffing tests you. It is a demanding job. If you don’t really want it you won’t be able to make it into a career. You can test what it is like to work in food through a play project.
Test the water . . .
All of the students on my Vegan Chef Diploma course have a current job but of course it isn’t one they love! They want to move into a career in vegan food so that they can have a job they truly love, one that feeds their soul. But I encourage them not to quit their current jobs immediately. Whilst they have a stable income they can explore what they might like to do in vegan food. They take an idea of what job they see themselves doing and try it out. For example, a student thinks they want to have a business running a food truck that goes to food festivals and markets. Buying a food truck and stock and developing a menu will need a lot of time and money. What if they invest all of that time and money only to find out they hate the reality of having a food truck?! And so they test it out on a small scale, with minimal outlay, through a “play project”. In this case a food stall would be your play project. It simulates the experience of having a food truck. You will make food in a large quantity, serve the general public and be in a food market environment. You will experience the very busy prep day (the day before the market), the early start and serving your food directly to the public. You will get to test your food out on people and get immediate feedback, which is great market research. This not only gives you the opportunity to test if you want to do this kind of job, it also gives you a lot of information on logistics.
You can also do a “play project” in cafes/restaurants and in other food businesses by working part time or as an intern. If you are working full time you may not relish the idea of working evenings and weekends. But remember, it isn’t forever. You can do this just for a few months until you get the information you need. Once it has served its purpose you can stop. Changing careers is a lot of work. It's a full time job in itself. Add that to the full time job you already have and you are a busy bunny! It is possible to make this seismic shift, but it isn’t easy.
An internship is essentially unpaid work experience. In the chef world the “stage” system is very common. Chefs will spend time working in other restaurants, without pay. This is because, when you work in the same restaurant for more than 6-12 months you can stop learning. In most food businesses the menu doesn’t change regularly and so a chef works with the same recipes, which limits their learning. A stage allows the chef to experience how other food is created and how another kitchen runs, this expands their knowledge greatly. Stages are agreed upon in a very informal way. It is a quid pro quo arrangement. The chefs gain knowledge, the food business gets the help of the chef for free. Whilst there is understandably negativity towards businesses that rely on and abuse free labour I don’t believe the stage system does, if it is done correctly.
I recommend to my chef students that they do their internship for as long as it is useful to them. On the Vegan Chef Diploma all students have the opportunity to do an internship although it is not compulsory. The internship is arranged with my help as I discuss expectations with the food business. An internship is a great opportunity to test the waters. I often find that students are trepidatious about working in a professional restaurant kitchen. They have seen hectic shouty kitchens on Masterchef and think that every kitchen is like that. Whilst I can, and do, tell my students that their assumption is incorrect it is better that they see it for themselves rather than take my word for it. This is a great way for students to test if they like working in a restaurant or cafe. If it is a negative experience they can walk away at any time. Which you cannot do if you have a full time job in a restaurant after quitting your previous full time job. You can do an internship even if you are not on a vegan chef course. But I advise you to be confident in your skills and knowledge of vegan cuisine before you do an internship.
An internship not only gives you an experience that will help you decide if you want a career in vegan food, it also allows you the opportunity to network. You will meet people in the industry and they will chat to you about what you want to and about their experiences and plans. This is fertile ground for potential collaborations and work opportunities.
Internships can be in a wide variety of food businesses. I have placed students at fine dining restaurants such as Gauthier Soho, at a Tuscan retreat, with a bakery business and with a food charity that cooks 500 meals a day. The possibilities are as wide and varied as this rapidly developing sector is.
Explore career options . . .
Vegan cuisine is still in its formative years. As the sector grows so do the opportunities for vegan chefs. You don't have to work in a restaurant or cafe. You could work as a caterer, as a private or personal chef, as a recipe developer, in ideation, as a food consultant or develop your own brand. This list is, by no means, exhaustive. If you want to become a vegan chef you should familiarise yourself with the opportunities that are available to you whilst also remembering that, year-on-year, those opportunities will increase and become more varied. At the start of my vegan chef career I could not have envisaged creating The Vegan Chef School and training over 250 people! Explore possible career routes by looking at job sites such as VeganJobs and Indeed. They are a great starting point.
Get trained . . .
I have worked as a private and personal chef for many years. I have experienced, first-hand, the steady increase in clients seeking vegan chefs and, in particular, chefs that have knowledge of nutrition. This is why I also created the Vegan Nutrition Diploma. Demand for a vegan chefs’ skills and expertise is, undoubtedly, on the rise. Although you may feel that you know enough about cooking and food to become a chef it is advisable to get a qualification. This shows a potential employer that you are committed to this career change, it isn’t just a flight of fancy. A chef course will help you to learn the fundamentals of cooking, a broad spectrum of recipes and ingredients and how to cost and scale recipes. Being a chef is so much more than being able to follow a recipe! This type of knowledge is a marked difference to the skillset you built up as an avid amateur. As chefs we think of food in a different way to even the most accomplished homecooks. Professional chefs are part artist, part business. One cannot survive without the other. We have to create food that is tantalising to all the senses whilst also working to a budget, with minimal wastage and within severe time constraints.
Promote your food . . .
“We eat with our eyes”. This idiom has never been truer than today, when Instagram and a sexy website is a chefs portfolio. A photograph has the power to tell people that your food is delicious. Sharing great photos of your food will connect you with people who are potential employers or collaborators. It will help you to practise recipe creation and plating. If you are also sharing the written recipe it gives you a lot of practice at what is a tricky task. This is all great experience. You should start sharing your food pictures as soon as you can. If you need to develop photography skills you can take a food photography course, such as my Food Photography for Chefs diploma. I recommend that you create a website using Squarespace. It was designed for artists and photographers, so its primary focus is images, which are central to promoting food. Squarespace is easy to use and very intuitive.
What’s to come . . .
In 2010, when I became a vegan chef, people laughed at me and said “Who are you gonna cook for? There are hardly any vegans!”. In 2017, when I was doing a cooking demonstration at Vegfest, I urged anyone in the crowd who wanted to become a vegan chef to do so. At that time you could get a job in London as a vegan chef just based on your passion and being vegan. You didn’t need training or experience. That's how desperate food businesses were for vegan chefs. In 2022 there are more vegan chefs, so businesses require you to have passion, training and, preferably, experience. Demand still outweighs supply, there are more vegan chef jobs than qualified vegan chefs. But that won’t always be the case. As more aspiring vegan chefs become qualified and experienced chefs go vegan, supply will catch up with demand. This is just another natural progression in the development of vegan cuisine. If you want to become a vegan chef you shouldn’t wait, start your journey now!