Want to spend your summer living by the sea in Spain, Greece, or Portugal, but don’t want to wait months for a job interview? There is one place in every single holiday resort that is always hiring, pays well, and usually comes with free housing: the kitchen!
If you’ve never worked in a restaurant before, stepping into a professional kitchen might sound a bit scary. However, behind those double doors is an amazing world that is actually one of the easiest ways to start your journey abroad. Let’s break down what kitchen workers actually do all day and how you can lock in a contract for this season.
Where can you actually work?
Kitchen staff jobs aren’t just found in traditional local restaurants. When you look for a summer contract abroad, you can choose from a huge variety of places depending on the vibe you are looking for:
- Large holiday resorts & Hotels: Usually the best option if you want great free accommodation packages and big international teams.
- Beach clubs & seaside venues: Perfect if you want to work right by the water and experience a summer environment.
- Local restaurants, tavernas, or pizzerias: Great if you want to experience the culture of the country and work in a smaller, family-style situation.
- Camping sites & holiday villages: Surrounded by nature and filled with young travelers.
- Cruise ships: For those who want to experience life on the water while traveling to different destinations.
The foot in the door for the hospitality industry
If you are thinking about a career in the hospitality industry, starting in the kitchen is one of the smartest moves you can make. It’s the perfect way to get your foot in the door, learn how a business operates from the inside and build a professional network. You will be working with managers, chefs, and teammates from all over the world. The connections and networking you do during a single summer can easily open doors for higher roles, future promotions, or international transfers in the years to come.
What type of job is kitchen staff?
One of the biggest mistakes people make is thinking they need to be a professional chef to work in a kitchen. That is not true at all! A professional kitchen works like a team. Everyone has one job to do, and you repeat it to help the whole team.
Depending on your experience and what you want to do, you can apply for three main types of jobs in a restaurant kitchen staff team:
Kitchen Porter
They are the absolute backbone of the kitchen. If a restaurant runs out of clean plates or hot pans for even five minutes during dinner, everything stops.
- What you’ll do: Operate big dishwashers, wash heavy pots, keep the workspace clean, handle the trash, and help unload food deliveries.
- The requirements: Zero experience needed. Employers just want someone with good energy who can work fast.
- Why it’s perfect: It is the easiest way to move abroad immediately, make friends, and work without worrying about language barriers.
Kitchen Assistant
If you love food and want to help prepare the meals, this role connects the cleaning team and the professional chefs.
- What you’ll do: Handle basic food prep like washing, peeling, and cutting vegetables, portioning meat or fish, and helping plate the dishes.
- The requirements: No degree needed, but you should have decent knife skills, care about details, and follow basic food safety rules.
- Why it’s perfect: You get to work directly with food and learn the basics of a professional kitchen.
Junior Professional Chef
This is the first official step to becoming a professional chef. You don’t just prepare ingredients, but you actually cook during live service.
- What you’ll do: Work under a station chef to manage one part of the kitchen (like salads, appetizers, or the grill), read order tickets, and cook fast.
- The requirements: Usually requires hospitality school or at least one summer of experience in a restaurant.
- Why it’s perfect: It is a fantastic way for culinary students to build an amazing CV while living abroad.
A day in the life: what is a seasonal kitchen shift really like?
Let’s talk about daily life, because this is the best part of working a summer job in a resort. Most seasonal kitchens use a split schedule. This means your workday is split into two parts, giving you a lot of free time right in the middle of the day.
Here is what a normal day looks like when you are part of a summer staff for kitchen team:
- The morning prep: You walk in and start preparing. The vibe is usually quite relaxed. If you are an assistant, you spend the morning chopping vegetables and getting your station ready.
- The afternoon freedom: This is the best part! It’s perfect for those who want to enjoy their time in the sun. It gives you a chance to actually live like a local and enjoy the summer weather before the evening rush starts.
- The service rush: This is where the energy completely changes. Once the dinner orders start coming, you have to be ready. You are working closely with the rest of the crew to make sure everything is done on time.
- The closing time: You clean up the kitchen, and then the fun part begins. Most restaurants give you a free late-night staff meal, and the team sits down together for a drink. Because you worked hard together, you became close friends very fast. After that, you usually head out to the local bars or beach clubs together!
Is working as kitchen staff hard or stressful?
Let’s be totally honest: yes, during the dinner rush, it can be. You are on your feet and when many orders come in at the same time, you have to move fast. However, that intensity also has positive sides.
You are not working alone! You are working with a group of other young people who are exactly like you. Surviving a busy night together creates an amazing bond.
Plus, kitchen culture has some incredible perks that go way beyond teamwork. For starters, you learn skills you will use forever. Even if you don’t want to be a chef in the future, mastering a fast-paced environment, working under pressure, and multitasking are massive green flags for your CV that future employers absolutely love.
On top of that, you get free food every single day. Enjoying fresh, hot meals provided by the chefs means you never have to worry about cooking after a long shift or wasting your savings on expensive supermarket trips.
Ultimately, this leads to a zero cost of living. Since your meals are covered and accommodation is usually included in the contracts, you can completely forget about the crazy rent prices in tourist towns, making it the cheapest way to live abroad.
What skills do you need to succeed?
Seasonal managers care much more about your personality and your attitude than a university degree. If you have ever played on a sports team, worked in a busy shop, or done a group project at school, you already have the most important skills:
- Being fast: When guests are waiting, you need to move quickly and stay focused.
- Teamwork: You can’t be selfish in a kitchen. You need to be ready to help your teammates when your own job is finished.
- Staying calm: If something goes wrong or it breaks, you don’t panic. You just fix it and keep going.
- Cleanliness: You don’t need to be an expert, but you must keep your hands and your workspace clean and safe.
Why employers want you and why you’ll get hired fast
If you are looking for a summer job at the last minute, or if you just want to make sure you actually get hired without waiting weeks for an answer, the kitchen is your best choice. They don’t expect you to have a lot of experience, they just want people who are hardworking, reliable, and ready to learn. Because the summer season is so busy, employers are processing applications super fast right now, which means you could literally secure a job within a few days.
Here is why these kitchen roles are a fantastic deal for your summer abroad:
- No language barriers: If you work at a hotel reception desk or as a waiter, you usually need to speak the local language fluently plus two or three others just to handle customer complaints. In the kitchen, things are much easier. You don’t need to speak the local language of the country you are moving to at all. As long as you can speak basic English to understand safety rules and talk with your teammates, you are ready to work.
- You can save a lot of money: Renting a room in a beautiful tourist town during July and August is almost impossible and super expensive. However, when you look for a job, you will see that almost every kitchen contract comes with an amazing benefit: free accommodation and free meals. Since you don’t have to pay rent or spend money on supermarkets, your living expenses drop to basically zero. This means you can save almost your entire paycheck to travel, party, and explore on your days off.
How to apply in 3 simple steps
Ready to stop dreaming and start your adventure? Landing one of these jobs is easier than you might think, even without previous experience. You just need to be smart with how you apply, so it is important to follow these three simple steps to secure your contract for this season:
- Fix your CV: If you don’t have kitchen experience, don’t worry. Highlight jobs or activities where you had to be punctual, hard-working, and a good team player: it can be a retail job, an extracurricular activity or even volunteer work.Put a short, friendly intro at the top of your CV explaining that you are motivated, full of energy, and excited to learn. If you’re unsure where to start, read our guide on how to write an international CV before applying.
- Write a Cover Letter: When you send your CV, never leave the message box empty. Managers are full of applications and a short, personal message will make you stand out. Introduce yourself, state clearly that you are ready to relocate immediately for the season, and emphasize your availability to work flexible hours. Keep it short and show you’re positive, proactive, and ready to join the team.
- Apply to more places: The biggest mistake you can make is applying to just one job and waiting around for an answer. Because it is the busy summer season and restaurants are desperately looking for kitchen staff, managers are processing applications incredibly fast. Increase your chances by sending your CV to three or four different resorts or hotels today! This puts you in control. Within a few days, you will likely get a couple of positive replies, and you will actually get to choose the best location, package, and team for your summer adventure!
Ready to start your summer adventure?
A summer job abroad is about so much more than work, It’s an experience that completely changes how you look at things. It is about stepping out of your comfort zone, living in your dream city and making friends you will keep forever. It will build your confidence and make you realize that you can handle way more than you thought.
You will be working with people from all kinds of backgrounds, solving problems and learning how to stay calm when things get busy. Those are important skills that stay with you forever, no matter what career you choose later on. And the best part is that the friends you make and the things you experience during those months will stay in your stories forever and will become the craziest, funniest memories of your life.
So don’t waste any more time wondering “what if” and asking yourself how your life could have been if you had actually taken that chance.