You’re skilled at delivering an unforgettable experience for patrons visiting a fine-dining restaurant. Serving a 12-course dinner and providing a bespoke six-glass wine arrangement to boot comes naturally to you.
Transferring all of that onto a one-page resume and wondering whether you can trust an AI cover letter generator? Not as easy.
Fortunately, we’ve helped thousands of fine dining servers update their resume to land their next job in the world of upscale hospitality. Keep reading this guide to discover how to do just that, starting with these three sample fine dining server resumes.
Related resume examples
What’s Most Important: Your Skills & Work Experience
Working in the fine dining industry takes serious skills; it’s not a job for the faint-hearted! That’s why you need to make sure your skills section shines. If not, recruiters won’t be able to see what you have to bring to the table.
While most of the skills you can include on your fine dining server resume will be more general soft skills like communication or time management, you should also include any skills you’ve picked up via training or certifications, like CPR, as this can help you stand out.
Plus, make sure you don’t include a laundry list of skills! You can weave in the other skills in your work experience.
Not sure what to include? Here are the top skills you should write down.
9 best fine dining server skills
- Food safety
- Customer service
- POS terminals
- Bilingual
- Leadership
- Hospitality certification
- Tourism management
- CFSP certification
- Wine knowledge
Sample fine dining server work experience bullet points
While it’s important to include skills that showcase your breadth of talent, your work experience section will really help breathe life into what you can offer as a server in fine dining.
A fine dining waiter is expected to have a deep understanding of wine and gastronomy, while also being collaborative and a great team player. The best way to translate all of this into words is by showing your impact.
What that means is clearly demonstrating what your responsibilities and tasks led to, like great customer satisfaction or exceeding sales targets. It’s then easy for recruiters to quickly and tangibly see what you could bring to the team, even if this is your first fine dining server job!
Here are some examples of what it could look like in practice.
- Memorized 30 menu items and exceeded sales targets by 6% by up-selling daily specials
- Maintained extensive knowledge of 35+ menu items, including flavor profiles, cooking methodology, and ingredients origin to promptly and thoroughly answer patrons’ questions
- Coached 4 junior servers in managing up to 6 tables simultaneously, increasing turnover and sales by 18%
- Familiarized myself with 35+ bottles of wine and provided in-depth wine pairing recommendations to our 7- and 12-course meals to 96% customer satisfaction
- Provided friendly and professional first point of contact for 300+ guests a night, greeting and seating them within 10 seconds of arrival on average
Top 5 Tips for Your Fine Dining Server resume
- Focus on food and wine experience
- If this is your first fine dining server job, you’ll want to showcase your knowledge of gastronomy and wine. Use your work experience section to emphasize any previous experience you’ve had with wine pairings or recommendations, as this could help guarantee an interview.
- Leadership skills are important
- An upscale server job position often comes with extra responsibility, so if you’ve advised, coached, or helped train junior staff, this should be clearly displayed on your fine dining waiter resume.
- Use quantifiable metrics
- Although it’s often harder to fully quantify your impact in a fine dining restaurant, provide your best estimate. Numbers land better than vague language, so work in metrics like the number of customers served or menu items memorized. It makes a difference!
- Skip the career objective
- Most career objectives add little or anything to your resume besides meaning more text for recruiters to read. When they have dozens or hundreds of fine dining server resumes to go through, this can cost you valuable time! Only add it if it’s fully customized to the job description, or if you have unique certifications or experience you want to focus on (like if you’ve worked under a famous chef or exclusive restaurant).
- Keep it easy to read
- A great resume will be easy on the eyes. Use a clean, simple font, have plenty of white space, and use simple bullet points. To avoid formatting issues, avoid graphics or images, and if possible, send a PDF version.
How to Write a Fine Dining Server Resume
- Focus on your most relevant experience
When you set up your resume, make sure to structure your resume in reverse-chronological order. This will help hiring managers see the most recent restaurants or clubs you’ve worked in. These jobs most accurately express your skill and experience, be it in fine dining or elsewhere in food service.
- Show that you care throughout your whole resume
Fine dining is, for many patrons, a once-in-a-long-time kind of experience, and you’re there to make sure it’s unforgettable. Just like you adjust your service to match each patron, make sure to update your resume to suit the job description closely. Swap skills and work experience bullet points as required to stand out from the crowd.
- Pick the right work experience bullet points
Your resume will be much more powerful if you focus on the impact your work has had instead of talking about the daily grind. Maybe you’ve leveraged various sales techniques to increase wine upselling by 31%, or you’ve scored 98% on customer satisfaction rating surveys? Flaunt these accomplishments to show you’re ready for the intricate world of fine dining.
- Express your passion for the fine dining industry
If you have experience or hobbies related to fine dining, make sure to include those in your resume. Perhaps you’ve done a course in wine tasting or taken cooking classes in your spare time to prepare the perfect crème brûlée? Find a resume template that lets you add those things in to show that you’re interested in the industry beyond just finding a job.
- Tweak your resume to perfection
Just like you go out of your way to make the dining experience special for every customer, apply that same attention to detail to your resume. Before you send it off, proofread it, make sure that it looks nice and clean, and pepper in some useful metrics and active verbs to really own your past achievements and make an impression.
A page at most is preferred. If it’s less, that’s no problem, as long as you include all the information mentioned in this fine dining server resume guide! And don’t forget your contact info; it happens to the best of us!
There’s no need to include a picture. Photos can change the layout of your resume, and it’s difficult for applicant tracking systems to parse the data, but if you do include it, try to upload a PDF version.
Yes, you do! All that means is that you should be sure that you include any relevant skills the fine dining job description asks for and that your work experience reflects the profile they’re looking for.
