A new chef de partie starts on a Thursday lunch service. The head chef has been thinking about onboarding since approximately 11.40am the same morning, when reception called to say the new starter had arrived. The brief is “run him through what he needs and get him on grill for Friday.” By Friday night the new starter has been on the grill section for one full service. The head chef has spent the entire weekend angry at him for not knowing things nobody taught him. The new starter spends Monday looking at other jobs. Two weeks later he is gone.
This is the back-of-house onboarding pattern as practised in roughly every restaurant kitchen I have ever worked in or talked to. It is fast, it is cheap, it produces astonishingly bad outcomes, and there is a structurally better alternative that the industry mostly refuses to adopt because the industry believes the old pattern is somehow respectful of the trade.
The same front-of-house onboarding patterns we wrote about previously do not transfer to a kitchen. The brigade structure, the equipment risk, the food safety regime, and the service-pressure dynamic mean back of house needs its own structured first week. Here is what that looks like.
The brigade as a training map
The brigade de cuisine is a 19th-century French organisational structure that has survived because it works. Each station has clear competencies, clear handovers, and a clear chain of authority. Most kitchens run a stripped-down version — larder, sauce, grill, pastry, sometimes a separate fish or vegetable section — but the structural principle is the same: each station has its own skillset and its own service routines.
That structure is also a training map. A new chef de partie does not need to learn “the kitchen.” They need to learn the specific station they will run, and they need to be observed and signed off on that station before they work it alone in service. Treating the kitchen as one undifferentiated thing — “watch what we do and pick it up” — produces gaps in specific areas that only show up when service pressure exposes them.
Pick one station for the first week. Two if the new starter is genuinely senior. Not the whole kitchen.
The first-week structure
Five days, four phases.
Day one: the kitchen walk and HACCP induction.Two hours before lunch prep, ideally not on a service day. Walk the kitchen physically — where every piece of equipment lives, the dishwash flow, the chemical store, the dry store, the cold rooms, the fire exits, the first aid kit, the head chef's office and door rules. Then the HACCP block: cook temperatures, cooling, cross-contamination, allergen segregation, delivery checks, what happens if the fridges fail. This is formal training, recorded per-individual against the kitchen's HACCP plan version. Critical control points get a knowledge check, not a signature.
Day two: shadow the station. The new chef de partie shadows the person currently running their station for a full service. They are not running the station. They are not taking tickets. They are observing the routine — mise en place, pass handover, ticket flow, plating standards, end-of-service breakdown. The senior on the station is told they are being shadowed, knows their job is to talk through what they are doing, and is not also being asked to break in a new commis at the same time.
Day three: paired service. The new chef runs the station alongside the senior. They take tickets. They plate. The senior is one step away and intervenes when needed. After service, a 20-minute debrief: what went well, what went wrong, what to change for tomorrow.
Day four: supervised solo. The new chef runs the station. The senior is in the kitchen but on a different section. The head chef or sous is on the pass and watching. After service, a competency sign-off: head chef or sous confirms the new chef is safe to run the station unsupervised for the next service. Or not — in which case the recovery plan is named (extra shadow, extra paired service, station change).
Day five: independent service. The new chef runs the station. Their record now shows: HACCP knowledge check passed against version 2026.4, shadow service completed on Thursday, paired service completed Friday, signed off competent for grill section by head chef Saturday. They are safe to be on the rota for the station they have been trained to.
HACCP and the critical control points
Most of a kitchen's training programme can survive on observation and apprenticeship. HACCP cannot. Critical control points are the things that, if they fail, cause food poisoning or a fatality. They are non-negotiable formal training, knowledge-checked, recorded per-individual, against a named version of the kitchen's HACCP plan.
The four CCPs that matter most in a restaurant kitchen:
Cook temperatures. Each protein has a target core temperature. The probe gets checked at a specified frequency. Every chef who handles cooked protein needs to know the target temperatures, the probe procedure, what to do if the probe reads wrong, and what to do if the protein under-cooks. A knowledge check, not a signature.
Cooling. Cooked food that needs to be chilled has a temperature curve it must follow. The two-hour rule is the most-commonly-misremembered rule in the kitchen because it sounds simple and the actual implementation has edge cases. Formal training, scenario-based check.
Cross-contamination. Colour-coded boards, separate prep areas for raw and cooked, hand-wash discipline, equipment cleaning between proteins. Most kitchens have a board on the wall; few have a knowledge check per individual confirming the person actually understands it.
Allergen segregation. The allergen-specific cooking procedures, the allergen station setup, the customer-facing allergen response. The piece on allergen training records goes deeper on what the evidence layer needs to look like; in the kitchen specifically, every chef de partie needs to be trained and checked on the segregation procedure for their station before they cook for the first allergen-flagged ticket.
Knife skills and the difference between training and trial-by-fire
Knife skills are the example I want to dwell on because they show the difference between training a kitchen and breaking it in. Knife skills are a competency. They take years to develop fully and weeks to develop to safe-on-the-line standard. The traditional approach is to give a new commis a job that requires the skill and let them figure it out, with predictable results — slower service, more waste, more cuts, and the occasional emergency department visit.
The structured approach is to assess knife skills on day one (a 15-minute walk-through with the head chef or a senior — knife grip, board safety, the four basic cuts on a carrot, a watched bone-out on a chicken if relevant to the station). The assessment produces a level — safe to prep, safe to prep under supervision, not safe to prep on the line yet. The new chef's first-week tasks are calibrated to that level. The level gets reassessed in the week-one review.
This is a 15-minute investment that prevents a six-week morale collapse. It also gives the head chef something defensible to point to if there is an incident — “X was assessed at level Y on day one, was rostered tasks at level Y, and the cut happened during a task at level Z which they had not been assessed for” is a defensible position. “He just started, we hadn't got round to checking him out properly” is not.
The records you wish you had
An environmental health officer (EHO) walks into your kitchen. They look at the temperature log on the wall, point at last Thursday's reading, and ask “who took this reading?” The kitchen manager looks at the initials and names the chef. The EHO asks “what training had they had?” And the answer matters.
For the answer to land in under a minute, three things need to be true.
Per-individual HACCP training record. Each chef has a record showing they completed the HACCP induction against a named version of the plan, passed the knowledge check, and have completed the refresher within the last twelve months.
Station competency sign-off. A signed record showing the chef was observed running each station they work, the head chef or sous confirmed competence, and the date.
Refresher cadence. When the HACCP plan changes, when a new allergen procedure is introduced, when a critical control point is updated, the affected chefs are retrained and the record is updated with the new version.
Most kitchens have none of these. The ones that survive a tough EHO visit have at least two.
What kills the pattern
Three things kill the structured first-week pattern, all of them avoidable.
The wrong starting day. A new chef who starts on a Thursday before a weekend service is doomed. The kitchen is too busy to onboard them, the senior is too busy to shadow them, and the new chef ends up on the station for paired service before they have shadowed it. Start new chefs on a Monday or Tuesday. Quiet services are not a luxury for onboarding; they are the operational condition that makes onboarding possible.
The undocumented brigade. A brigade without written station SOPs is one where every senior chef teaches their own version of how the station runs. That produces inconsistency that shows up as plating variance, ticket-time variance, and end-of-service breakdown variance. A short station SOP per section — mise en place list, opening routine, service routine, closing routine — gives the senior chef a script to teach from and gives the new chef a document to reference.
The unowned mentor. If nobody is named to mentor the new chef, the role defaults to whoever is least busy that shift, which means it defaults to nobody. A named senior (chef de partie or sous) takes the week-one responsibility. They are not running their own station alone at the same time. The head chef does the day-five competency sign-off and the week-one review.
The underlying logic
Kitchens have run on a sink-or-swim onboarding pattern for a long time and the cause is cultural rather than structural. The structural conditions — short shifts, high turnover, service pressure — are the same as front of house. What is different in the kitchen is the equipment risk, the HACCP regime, and the apprenticeship tradition that says you learn the trade by struggling at it.
A structured first week with shadowing, paired service, supervised solo, and a competency sign-off is not a betrayal of the trade. It is the trade done properly. It produces chefs who are safer in week two, more confident in week four, and less likely to leave in week six. It also produces the per-individual training records that make the next EHO visit short rather than long.
For operators who want to start, the hospitality industry pack includes station SOP templates, HACCP knowledge checks, and the per-chef training register format. For the broader pattern of structured first-week onboarding, our piece on the new starter's first 30 days covers the cross-industry version of the same logic.