How to Make a Culinary Portfolio

Co-authored by Boris Polissky

Last Updated: November 21, 2024

If you are a culinary artist or student seeking a culinary job, a portfolio can help you showcase your accomplishments, promote your services or restaurant, find a position, and build an online presence. Upload your portfolio to your website to share information about your experience, including samples of past menus, photos of your food, recipes you've created, and any awards you've won or certifications you've earned. You can also include the services you offer and other pertinent information relating to your career as a chef. We'll help you create a one-of-a-kind portfolio to show off all of your hard work!

Steps

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Are you trying to get a job? Are you trying to promote your restaurant? Are you trying to promote your catering business? This will shape how the portfolio comes together.
These should be high-quality photos that make you and your food shine. If you do not feel comfortable taking the photos yourself, you can have a friend or colleague do it for you or you can hire a professional photographer.

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You will need to scan the menus page by page so they are in a digital format and can be used on your website. If you cannot do this task yourself, hire someone to do it for you.
These can be recipes you created while in school or created for one of your signature menus. Your recipes will speak volumes about your cooking style and experience.^{[1]
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You don't necessarily want to list your experience online exactly like in the resume. However, you do need to keep track of the jobs you've worked because you will need to list them on your culinary portfolio.
This is a vital piece of your portfolio.^{[2]
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This is a particularly important step if you are a chef looking for catering or private chef jobs.
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This can increase your marketability to potential customers.
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Build your portfolio website. There are 3 different ways you can go about doing this. You can build it yourself with basic website design software or HTML knowledge, you can hire a designer to work with you to create it, or you can use an online service designed specifically for building an online portfolio.
- Want to use your portfolio to get a position as a private chef? Get tips from wikiHow users on our How do you become a private chef? forum.

Community Q&A

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How do you use the standard recipe?

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You just take that standard recipe and turn it into something fun. Have pictures and decorate your paper. You can also present it in a clean way and come off strong, but not too strict or too strong which would make it very serious and ruin the whole thing.

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Tips

It is entirely up to you as to how to structure your portfolio, but keep it simple for both you and your visitors.

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Adding a "Hire Me" page to your portfolio may be a good idea if you are aiming to book clients directly with your website.

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Tips from our Readers

The advice in this section is based on the lived experiences of wikiHow readers like you. If you have a helpful tip you’d like to share on wikiHow, please submit it in the field below.

Make sure you have clean and simple plating. Wipe any sauce or drops that are out of place so the main course is the focal point of your photo.
Make sure to also make physical copies of your portfolio that you can take with you and give to potential clients.
Include testimonials from previous employers to showcase your work ethic.

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