Hiring guideChecked against FDA, DOL and BLS sources, 15 September 2026

Cook Interview Questions

Good interview questions for cooks are about volume, station and schedule. A cook who worked sauté at a 220-cover restaurant on Saturdays has told you more in one sentence than an hour of questions about passion for food. Two facts set the frame. Food-safety certification for cooks is state and county law, not federal — the FDA Food Code is a model that jurisdictions adopt, amend or ignore, so whether your candidate needs a card depends on where your kitchen sits. And the pay you are bidding against is public: restaurant cooks had a median wage of $17.98 an hour in May 2025. Below are eight questions worth the time, what a strong answer sounds like, and what to do with a lapsed certification.

What the health code decides before you ask anything

There is no federal food handler card. The FDA Food Code is a model: FDA publishes it so that “local, state, tribal, and federal regulators use the FDA Food Code as a model to develop or update their own food safety rules.” The current edition is 2022, and none of it applies to your kitchen until your state or county adopts a version. Hence the same question getting a different answer 40 miles down the road.

Two credentials get confused constantly, and the difference decides who needs what.

• A food handler card. The line-level one. Texas requires food handler training and gives new hires a window — the state program says employees complete it “within 30 days of getting a job.” Other states require nothing.
• A food protection manager certification. The person-in-charge one. New York City requires that “food places must have a supervisor with a Food Protection Certificate” who “must be on duty during all hours of operation.” That is a staffing constraint, not a nice-to-have.

BLS puts it plainly: cooks typically learn on the job, and “some states and localities require cooks to have a food handler’s certification.” Some. Find out which you are before writing the ad.

If you hire anyone under 18

The federal limits are equipment-based rather than task-based. Under DOL Fact Sheet 2A, 16- and 17-year-olds may work unlimited hours in non-hazardous jobs but may not operate “power-driven meat and poultry processing machines (meat slicers, meat saws, patty forming machines, meat grinders, and meat choppers),” commercial mixers or power-driven bakery machines — and the ban covers cleaning and setting them up, not only running them.

Fourteen- and 15-year-olds are tighter again: no more than three hours on a school day, 18 in a school week, 40 in a week when school is out, and no baking. If your prep list runs through a slicer, a 16-year-old cannot be the one who runs it. Settle that in the interview, not with an inspector.

Eight questions worth the time

These assume you confirmed availability, transport and start date on the phone already — if not, that call is in our pre-screening questions.

“Which station did you work, and how many covers did you do on a Saturday?”

Two questions in one, and the most informative on the list. Station tells you what they can do; covers tell you at what speed. A cook who has only worked a 60-cover dining room has never seen your Friday.

A strong answer is specific and unprompted: “Sauté and grill, 200 to 240 on a Saturday, two of us on the hot line.” A weak one stays abstract after you ask twice. Cooks who worked volume remember the numbers.

“What prep did you own, and how long did it take you?”

Prep is where knife skills live, and it is the part most often skipped in interviews. Ask what they owned before service — stocks, proteins, the case of onions — then ask how long. “Two cases of onions, 40 minutes, plus peppers and the soup” tells you about hand speed in a way no adjective can.

The weak answer treats prep as someone else’s job. Fine if you run a dedicated prep shift; a problem if your line cooks prep their own stations, which in most independent kitchens they do.

“What was your ticket time on a busy night, and what made it go long?”

Ticket times are the closest thing a kitchen has to a performance record, and the second half of the question is the useful half. Anyone can name a number. The cooks worth hiring tell you what broke it: six tickets at once, a fryer that could not recover, a twelve-top of well-done steaks.

A strong answer sounds like diagnosis. A weak one blames the servers every time, with no mechanism attached.

“Was that food made from raw, or was it assembled?”

Scratch kitchens and assembly kitchens produce different cooks, and a resume cannot tell them apart. Four years at a chain where the sauces arrived in bags builds speed and consistency, but may never have involved breaking down a chicken or adjusting a sauce by taste. Both answers are fine; only one matches your kitchen.

The strong answer is specific: “Mostly assembly. Stocks came in. I butchered the salmon and made the two soups.” The weak answer inflates, and you find out on day three.

“Where does your food handler card stand right now?”

Ask the status, not the yes-or-no. “Current, expires in March,” “expired last year,” “I have the manager certificate” and “never had one” each mean something different, and the table below says what to do with each.

Where a card is required, ask to see the certificate and write the expiry into the file. If you would pay for the course, say so in the interview: between two offers at the same wage, that is a real difference.

“Tell me about the last time somebody got cut or burned on your line.”

Every kitchen has burns and cuts. What varies is what happened next: whether it got reported and the station got covered, or whether you wrapped a towel around it and kept working.

A strong answer is procedural — what happened, who took the station, whether it went in the log. “Never, not once” from someone with six years on a hot line is not reassuring. Follow it with what you do here: who they tell, where the kit is.

“This job is Wednesday to Sunday, 3pm to close, and we open Thanksgiving. What does that do to your week?”

Name the schedule that actually hurts, and name it early. Not “some evenings and weekends” but the real one: Friday and Saturday nights, the holidays you open, the close that is midnight on paper and 1am in practice. BLS is blunt that cook hours “may include early mornings, late evenings, weekends, and holidays.” Your candidate knows that much. They do not know which of it applies here.

The answer you want is logistical rather than enthusiastic: who collects the kids, what the bus does after 11pm, which other job they are keeping. “Whatever you need, I am totally flexible,” with no questions back, means they have not thought about it, and you find out on the first Saturday.

“Nine tickets are up and we just 86’d the salmon on two of them. Walk me through the next minute.”

The only hypothetical here, and it earns its place because it tests communication under load rather than knowledge. Listen for the order of operations: call it out, tell the expo, find the substitute, keep the other seven moving.

A weak answer goes quiet, solves it alone, or invents a dish nobody ordered. A strong answer talks. The cook who says it out loud in five seconds beats the one with better technique who says nothing for four minutes.

Answers that sound like problems and are not

Restaurant resumes look alarming to anyone who has spent their career in an office. Most of it is just how the industry works.

• Four jobs in three years. A cook who moved for a dollar an hour each time behaved rationally. Look at the reasons, not the count — see restaurant turnover rates.
• No culinary school. BLS reports cooks typically learn through on-the-job training and related work experience. Formal training is an option here, not the path.
• They came from fast food or a chain. Assembly kitchens build speed, consistency and the ability to hold a station when the board is full. Three of the four things you need. Teach the fourth.
• An expired card. Where there is a grace window, this is an administrative item with a deadline, not a failed interview.

Certification status: what to do with each answer

Your own jurisdiction governs this table. Confirm the window, the validity period and whether an out-of-state card counts before you set policy.

Test the knife, do not discuss it

Knife skills are the part of this job an interview cannot assess and fifteen minutes on a board can. Run it properly: a defined task, a fixed length, a written scorecard, and pay for the time. Dice an onion, break down a chicken, fire three real tickets.

Two cautions. Unpaid trial shifts are a wage-and-hour problem, and the rules are in our guide to the working interview. And score against something written — an interview scorecard keeps four managers judging the same knife cut the same way, and keeps your reason for declining tied to the job. Do not let a trial shift become a channel for questions you cannot legally ask; the list is in illegal interview questions. If you hire from walk-ins, the trial-and-offer version is in on-the-spot hiring.

The market you are interviewing against

You are not competing with the restaurant across the street. You are competing with every kitchen within a 20-minute drive, plus the hospital cafeteria and the senior-living kitchen that closes at seven.

From BLS national OEWS data for May 2025, 1,409,890 people were employed as restaurant cooks (SOC 35-2014), at a median wage of $17.98 an hour, a mean of $18.62 and an annual mean of $38,730. Across all cook types the BLS occupational profile puts the May 2025 median at $17.62, the lowest 10 percent under $12.85 and the highest 10 percent over $22.84.

The type-by-type numbers should worry an operator. Fast food cooks had a median of $14.85, restaurant cooks $17.98, institution and cafeteria cooks $18.01 — school and senior-living kitchens now pay marginally more than restaurants at the median, for hours that usually end earlier. BLS projects cook employment to grow 7 percent from 2025 to 2035, with about 393,200 openings a year over the decade.

What it costs to get one of these people to apply is a separate question, and we will not claim more precision than we have. Our benchmark carries no cook-specific role family — the sample is too small to publish one, and mapping cooks onto a warehouse or caregiver row would be making it up. The figure we can stand behind is the overall one: across 891 Boostpoint-managed Meta campaigns and 1,334 campaign-months, the median cost per applicant was $13.88, inclusive of campaign management. For the restaurant build-up — advertising, referral bonuses, manager hours, onboarding — see cost per hire in restaurants, and for the ad itself, line cook and kitchen staff recruiting.

What to say, not just what to ask

Cook candidates are interviewing you at the same time, usually between shifts. Volunteer what most managers never mention. It removes the reasons people no-show the first shift.

• The actual schedule. Days, start time, real finish time, how many Saturdays in a row. If close means 1am on a Friday, say 1am.
• The rate and what moves it. A number, and the second number — after probation, after the certification, after they run the station alone.
• Who trains them, and for how long. “Two weeks on prep with Marcus, then garde manger” is an answer. “You will pick it up” loses people in week two.
• Holidays and blackout weeks. Which you open, how they are staffed, whether there is premium pay. Settle it now, not in November.
• Where the job goes. Prep to line, line to lead, lead to sous. If there is no progression, say that too — some cooks want the station and the stability, nothing else.

If your ad does not already say most of this, fix the ad first: ours for this role is at cook job description. The first two weeks, where most frontline hires are actually lost, are covered in first 90 days turnover.

Line cook, prep cook, fry cook, kitchen staff: one ad, four jobs

The titles are used interchangeably in job ads, which is one reason kitchen hiring produces so many mismatched applicants. Be precise internally, even when the ad is broad.

• Line cook. Works a station during service. Interview for speed, ticket times and communication on the pass — questions one, three and eight.
• Prep cook. Works before service. Interview for knife work, volume, consistency, working a prep list unsupervised, and labeling. Question two is the center of it.
• Fry or sauté cook. A line cook named by station. Ask about recovery time on the fryer and what they do when two stations fire at once.
• Kitchen staff. Usually everyone back of house including dish. Screen for which job the person actually wants: a dishwasher moving up and a cook applying to anything are different conversations.

One caution on food-safety trivia. The temperatures cooks get quizzed on — 165°F poultry, 160°F ground meat — come from federal consumer guidance, while your kitchen is governed by whatever food code your jurisdiction adopted, which can differ. Quiz on your code, not a chart. If you hire front of house too, the equivalent page is server interview questions, and the sector context is in hospitality employee turnover. And make the reference call: a former chef will tell you about attendance in a way an interview never will.