How to Use Dished In
Restaurant careers do not fit neatly on a résumé.
A job title might tell someone you were a line cook, bartender, server, GM, pastry chef, or dishwasher. It does not tell them what kind of volume you handled, what stations you worked, what you learned, what you created, who you worked with, or how you got from one job to the next.
That is the idea behind Dished In.
Dished In is a place for restaurant and hospitality people to build a real record of their careers. Not just where they worked, but what they actually did there. Over time, your profile can become part résumé, part portfolio, and part professional network.
You do not need to be looking for a job to use it. In fact, it is probably more useful if you build it while you are working, before you need it.
Start with your profile
Your profile is your home base on Dished In.
Add the basics first: what you do, where you have worked, and the roles you have held. From there, add the things that usually get lost when everything is reduced to a few lines on a résumé.
Maybe you worked grill and sauté on a busy dinner line. Maybe you composed cocktails, trained new servers, ran brunch, opened a new location, took over ordering, built a wine list, worked your way from dish to prep, or became the person everyone wanted on expo when the board filled up.
That is the kind of experience worth showing.
Restaurant people understand that the same title can mean very different things from one place to another. A sous chef at a 40-seat neighborhood restaurant has a different job from a sous chef doing 500 covers a night. Dished In gives you room to tell that story.
Add the Venues that shaped your career
Restaurants and other hospitality businesses are called Venues on Dished In.
A Venue might be a restaurant, bar, hotel, coffee shop, food truck, catering operation, club, or another place where hospitality work happens.
When you add your work history, connect yourself to the Venues where you actually worked. That helps give your experience context, but it also starts building the history of the Venue itself.
Restaurants are usually remembered by the people who were there.
The opening chef. The bartender who built the first cocktail list. The server who stayed for six years. The dishwasher who eventually became sous. The crew that opened the doors, survived the first slammed Saturday, and figured out how to make the place actually work.
Most of that history disappears as people move on. Dished In gives it somewhere to live.
If a Venue is already there, connect your experience to it. If it is not, add it.
Show what you actually made and did
Restaurant work is often visual, but most of that work disappears.
A cook can have years of dish photos buried in a phone. A pastry chef may have dozens of specials that were only on the menu for a weekend. A bartender might have built three cocktail lists across three different restaurants and have almost no record of them.
Dished In gives you a place to keep that work together.
Add dishes, drinks, menus, events, projects, or other work you are proud of. It does not all need to look like a magazine shoot. In fact, it probably should not.
A clean picture taken during service can sometimes say more than a heavily staged portfolio photo. We are anti-AI photos, so don’t try and take shortcuts and report any AI slop you see.
The point is not to make restaurant work look more glamorous than it is. The point is to show the work.
Build your network from the people you have actually worked with
The restaurant business has always run on relationships.
People bounce from kitchen to kitchen, bar to bar, and city to city. A cook you worked next to three years ago might be a chef de cuisine now. A server might become a GM. A bartender might open a bar. The dishie you trained might end up running the kitchen someday.
Those relationships matter because restaurant hiring has always relied heavily on some version of, “Who do you know?”
Dished In gives those connections a place to stay intact.
Connect with the people you have actually worked with, staged with, opened restaurants with, trained, managed, or spent enough shifts next to that you know how they work.
It is not really about collecting connections. It is about keeping track of the people who are part of your career.
Keep up with where people land
Restaurant people move around a lot.
Someone leaves for another restaurant. A chef opens a new place. A bartender becomes a beverage director. A GM moves across town. A Venue closes, reopens, or changes concepts.
Normally, you hear about those things through Instagram, a group text, or six months later when someone says, “Did you know Chris is over at that new place now?”
Dished In can make some of that easier to follow.
By connecting with people and Venues, you can keep up with the parts of the industry you actually care about instead of trying to piece everything together later.
Build it before you need it
Most people update a résumé when they are already trying to leave a job.
That usually means sitting down and trying to remember exactly when you started somewhere, what your title was, what you were responsible for, and what you accomplished two or three kitchens ago.
Dished In works better if you do the opposite.
Add things as they happen.
When you learn a new station, add it. When you move into a new role, update it. When you create something you are proud of, save it. When you move to a new Venue, connect it.
Then, when it is time for the next job, you are not trying to rebuild your career from memory. You already have it.
It does not have to be perfect
Your profile does not need to be finished before it is useful.
Start with your current job. Add a couple of past Venues. Connect with some former coworkers. Add a few pieces of work you are proud of.
Then keep going.
Restaurant careers are rarely clean or linear. People start in dish, jump to prep, move to the line, burn out, come back, switch to front of house, move into management, open something of their own, or end up doing a job they never expected.
That is part of what makes the industry interesting.
Dished In is built to follow that whole path.
So wherever you are in your career, start there.
Get Dished In.