Salary Information for Those Pursuing Culinary Arts Career Field

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Choosing Your Field

The first thing you’ll discover when going into the field of food preparation is there is a lot of variables within the pay expectancies. A line cook in an exclusive restaurant serving gourmet dishes might earn the same monthly income as a head cook in an economically based, family oriented chain restaurant. Nor is there a uniform agreement on qualifications. The manager at a fast food restaurant may have to start near the bottom, learning new food preparations before qualifying as a manager at a restaurant offering International cuisine.

Generally, chefs earn the highest culinary arts salary within any food service establishment. An executive chef can expect to earn an average of $60,000 a year, depending on location and type of restaurant. Well-established chefs may hire out their services, catering to banquets, festivals, weddings and conventions, earning in excess of $50 an hour.

When a Culinary Degree Helps

Earning a lucrative culinary arts salary is usually a long, involved process of ladder climbing. When you enter the restaurant business, you must learn all the cooking stations from food preparation to serving delicious platters. Before advancing into a sous chef position, you will be trained or sent to a culinary school to take courses in business management, budgeting and finance.

A culinary arts degree can be a short cut into acquiring a top position in your field of choice. Your degree demonstrates that you have already learned the skills needed for running a kitchen, and your education involved food handling and safety, the nutritional aspects and an ability to follow recipes and produce appetizing platters. With an associate’s degree in the culinary arts, you qualify for a sous chef or restaurant manager’s position, with an average salary of $30,000 to $38,000 a year.

Your ambition may be to cater to special dietary needs in a hospital setting, a kitchen manager or work for the packaged food industry. You might wish to work in the sales aspects of the food industry, designing programs for televisions and magazines that advertise fine restaurants, food tips, recipes or food education. With a culinary arts degree, you have the ability to shape your career to your special interests, earning an agreeable culinary arts salary based off your level of expertise.

When You Reach the Top

A good chef is like a good artist. Courses help artists hone their abilities, teach them a variety of techniques and introduce the International flavor of the arts. In the end however, it’s the artist’s delivery that spells success.

This delivery is what increases the artist’s reputation. Like an artist, the culinary artist is not only expected to duplicate the same quality creations over and over, but to experiment in the field. Your culinary arts salary increases with demand for your products. Top restaurants compete vigorously with each other in enticing a master chef to work for them. Master chef studied many refinements in delivering appetizing foods, used creativity and imagination to produce new, amazing products, and built a reputation through the consistent treatment of appetizers and platters that brought customers back to the same restaurant over and over again.