For cooks going aboard, and chefs already there
Nobody's country decides whether you're qualified to cook at sea. The flag on the transom does — and it usually asks for less than the schools do.
One person running a whole department, feeding a fixed group three times a day, in a room that does not stay level. Here is where it is alive, where we'd send you, and what the law actually wants.
This is a trade, not a tradition. Thousands do it for a living, and nobody hands it down: there is no old workshop and no line of teachers. It passes between chefs who overlap for a season, aboard — which is why the people worth learning from are working chefs who decided to teach, not heirs to anything.
Where it is most alive is not a school — it is a dock in a season. Antibes and Palma from spring, where the Mediterranean's crew are actually hired; Fort Lauderdale and the Caribbean from autumn, when the fleet crosses. Turn up in the right port at the right month and the craft is standing on the quay.
There is no lineage here to apprentice into: no century-old workshop, no line of teachers. What there is, and it counts, is two experienced yacht chefs who came off the boats to teach their own trade, under their own names, on published dates. That clears most of our bar.
What we could not establish is the room. Their pages say the exact venue goes to students two weeks before the week starts, so from the outside we cannot tell whether the teaching kitchen is theirs year-round or taken for the fortnight. That is an open question, not a mark against them — and it is the sort of thing we would rather leave open than guess at.
Three to five days of assessment. It is not a school's award: passing it is one of four things the MCA wants before it issues the Ship's Cook Certificate of Competency — the others being food-safety training, the five STCW basics and an ENG1 medical. That certificate is the document no flag will argue with.
The part nobody says out loud: it only counts at a centre the MCA has approved, and that list changes. On the most recent list we could find — an MCA reply reproduced publicly, accurate as of summer 2023 — the approved centres were Leiths School of Food and Wine (London), City of Glasgow College, Dumfries and Galloway College (Stranraer) and Entier Ltd (Westhill, Aberdeenshire). Tante Marie (Woking) advertises the assessment on its own current pages but is not on that 2023 list. We cannot resolve that from a desk, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Two weeks with Cara Whiteman and Amber Colle, working yacht chefs who teach it themselves and publish their own backgrounds. Galley management, provisioning, menus, etiquette and deck duties — plus three days and nights aboard a catamaran, which is the part that matters and the part almost no classroom has.
A week buys a taste and an orientation — enough to recognise later what real acquisition would feel like. It does not buy the craft. Nobody has shown that a week with a teacher beats the same hours practised alone, and we are not going to be the first to say it.
Three questions decide it. Most people never ask the first one.
"Qualified" is not one thing. It means something different on every transom.
It all comes from the ILO's Maritime Labour Convention 2006 — a seafarers' welfare instrument, which is why the trigger counts crew and not tonnage. Then each registry writes its own version.
Ten or more seafarers, on voyages over three days or more than 36 hours from a safe port.
"Qualified" can be met by an NVQ Level II — or simply confirmation that you have served as a chef in a professional kitchen, commercial yacht or passenger ship, plus hygiene, storage, stock-control and health-and-safety training.
They will also issue a Recognition of Qualification as a Ship's Cook on request. Voluntary — their word.
The regulation is short: cooks "shall be at least 18 years of age and documented as competent for their positions."
No certificate is named. The standard is delegated, not spelled out — the owner, the manager and the flag's guidance fill the gap.
The strictest of the three, and the only one naming a document: the Ship's Cook Certificate of Competency.
Age 18, one month of sea service in any capacity, the five STCW basics, an ENG1. It replaced rules that once demanded five years at sea.
The threshold is ten seafarers, master included — and most yachts run fewer.
On two of the three biggest yacht flags, professional kitchen time plus a hygiene qualification is the standard. No school required.
Under the UK's stricter route, the entry price is one month at sea in any capacity — not five years, and not a diploma.
A ten-day or two-week "superyacht chef course" awarding a house certificate or an industry one — GUEST, IYT. Useful. No flag requires either.
Recruitment support and industry contacts. Real help, worth paying for. No school can promise a job, and the honest ones say so.
Remaining-places counts. We do not verify anyone's, here or anywhere.
The con is not a fake school. It is the slide from useful to required — and nobody arrives having read their own flag's notice.
Cook only for guests and the law doesn't call you the ship's cook. MLC regulates whoever feeds the crew — which on plenty of boats is not the person with "chef" on the crew list.
Five years at sea became one month. In any capacity. The trigger also stopped being tonnage and operating area and became, in the MCA's own words, "the number of crew carried on the ship."
The legal ceiling is a Level 2. The UK pegs the outcomes no higher than QCF Level 2; Cayman names an NVQ Level II. The law that governs feeding a ship sits below a culinary diploma.
Which pan gets a wet cloth, how full is too full, where you stand when she rolls, which knife cut you don't attempt on a beam sea. The variable is the swell, and the swell is not in the book.
The same faces, three meals a day, for weeks. The judgement being trained is not "is this good" — it is "is this the fourth time this week."
On day three, what is the one error that destroys the service? Not yet put to a teacher in this craft. When it is, their answer goes here in their words. A school that cannot answer it has told you everything.
Nobody pays to be here — an honest blank outranks a plausible name, and every blank on this page is marked as one rather than filled.
The certificate is a door. The sea is the teacher.
Write me a letter about this one. Not a form — a letter, and I read every one myself. If you have cooked at sea and something on this page is wrong, that is the letter I want most.
Or find your people — the Circle is how these skills become real trips: the community first, then the place.
Join the Circle →Grouped by hand, not by an algorithm — same hands, same instinct, a different craft.