The restaurant and catering industries have undergone explosive growth in the last two years. Reality TV shows focusing on the restaurant business and cooking shows have become very popular have fueled this trend, as has a growing health consciousness among the public. Catering alone is a $6 billion a year sector of the economy and growing.



With so much money to be made, it is no surprise that catering companies are hiring like never before. This is in addition to the high hiring rate the field has always had due to high turnover in catering. Especially now though, there are always openings for catering jobs like cooks, dishwashers, bartenders and wait staff at these companies.

The function of a dishwasher in the restaurant is clear: washing dishes. In catering however, the dishwasher does double duty as busser, picking up dishes and performing bus station cleaning duties as well as the actual dishwashing work. Keeping track of waste is also often part of this job.

Food preparation is probably one of the most daunting of positions. It means a lot of chopping, cutting, slicing and packaging. It is your job to make sure the cooks have the ingredients they need when they need them. If they need ten onions chopped then it is your duty to make sure they are chopped and ready for when he needs them. You may have to handle meats as well as vegetables and pastas. Food preparation workers make salads and soups a lot of times as well as the chef is busy preparing the entre.

Chefs are the bread and butter of the catering line. It is the chef's job to make sure all the food is prepared. Not only just cooked but plated to look presentable and be done correctly. The chef may have underlings below him that he will direct and assign projects to in order to get the food cooked and plated. The chef will also help plan the menu of the evening, buy the food that is needed and hire the people that will be under his charge. The owner of the catering company (in many cases the chef is the owner) trusts the chef to know the ins and outs of the food and his staff.

In the catering industry, wait staff have one and only one function. This is of course making sure that the food gets out to the tables. Each wait staff person will have one to four tables to handle, their job being to get each course out to all of their diners in at the same time. Being quick is essential, as is having some class and courtesy; a catering job is not quite the same thing as working at your corner greasy spoon.