Lancaster
Head Chef. On The Run. We need a Head Chef who can serve two hundred and seventy six guests from a kitchen running at sixty miles an hour. You will do it around sixty times next year. The rest of the year is yours. THE TRAIN The Northern Belle is a luxury Pullman train. It entered service in 2001, restored in the style of Britain's great Belle and Pullman trains of the 1920s and 30s. Seven carriages, each named after a British stately home or castle and individually designed to match. Two kitchens on board. Up to 276 guests. In 2025 Condé Nast voted it fifth in the Best Train Trips in the World. THE JOB You run those kitchens, select your crew and manage them as a team. You build the seasonal menus with the owners and the train manager. The creative direction, however, is yours. You hold the standard on every single service, because on a train there is no quiet place to hide away. WHAT MAKES IT HARD Once the train leaves, that is it. No delivery, no supplier, no nipping out. Everything the service needs is loaded before the wheels turn, and the plan you wrote on Wednesday is the plan you have on Saturday. The timings belong to the railway. Guests join at four or five stations and the courses land between them. You cannot run late, because the train will not. And the kitchen moves the whole time. WHAT MAKES IT WORTH IT Around sixty service days a year, most of them Saturdays and Thursdays, running March to December. In January, February and most of March, you will not hear from us. The routes are the best in the country. Steam over the Settle and Carlisle. The West Highland Line to Oban. Edinburgh at Christmas. Royal Ascot, Chelsea, Goodwood. WHO WE ARE AFTER You know what perfect tastes like, because you have sent it out. A starred kitchen, a rosetted dining room, a country house, a private estate, a yacht, somewhere merely good would have been noticed. You are not coming to keep the food as it is. You are coming to make it better than you found it. You get the best from a brigade without raising your voice. The guests are a few feet away. You plan further ahead than you cook. You stay level when the timings move, and they will move. You do not mind a long day. There are not many of them. THE PAY £52,500 a year, for around sixty operating days plus about forty prep days. Do not forget there are long gaps at certain points in the year, the work is not spread evenly. We pay 12.07% holiday pay on top, along with the usual benefits of a company of this scale. We pay half your travel from home to the train, so you need not live near the depot, although that is your base. Where an overnight is required we provide it on the train. A hotel instead is at your own cost. When you apply, include a short note telling us how you think you could make a difference to the food on board one of the world's most luxurious trains. TPBN1_UKCT