Lead Line Cook

Lead Line Cook — Der Braumeister

Location: 13046 Lorain Ave, Cleveland, OH 44111 Pay: $19/hour to start. $23/hour after 60 days once you hit the benchmarks below — they're written down and you get them on day one. Hours: Full-time, 38–40 hours. Schedule: Wednesday through Saturday. Every Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday off — every week. Morning prep shifts into evening service. Weekends are part of the job.

What this job actually is:

Two-thirds of this job happens before the doors open.

You'll prep the line and fill pars for a made-from-scratch German kitchen. That means real knife work — dicing, slicing, and portioning for hours — plus building gravies, sauces, and components from raw ingredients. Jaeger gravy, spätzle, kraut, breading a schnitzel that comes out golden instead of grey.

Then you're on the line through service, cooking and keeping the line honest.

If you take pride in a station that's set right and you'd rather build the day than react to it, you'll like it here. If prep work feels like something you've graduated past, this isn't the job.

What you'll do

• Prep the line and fill pars daily — knife work, scratch sauces and gravies, portioning
• Cook your station through service, and cover any station when we're short
• Set stations before service, break them down and close the line after
• Run line checks; taste every sauce and know whether it needs salt, acid, or time
• Take beginning-of-shift counts, report shortages to the chef, and keep the waste log
• Build tomorrow's prep list off tonight's counts
• Train new back-of-house cooks on our recipes, plating, and how we do things
• Hold the line on food safety and cleanliness — yours and everyone else's

What we're really hiring for

We can teach recipes. We can't teach judgment. Here's the kind of thing this job asks of you:

• It's 7:15 on a Saturday, tickets are stacked, and you're down to four schnitzel. You need an answer before you need the chef.
• The gravy tastes flat. You can tell whether that's salt, acid, or it just needs more time — and you fix it without being told.
• The prep list says six quarts of kraut, but you know Thursday runs heavy. You adjust, and you tell someone why.

If reading those made you think of how you'd handle each one, apply.

What you need

• At least a year cooking in a full-service restaurant. Fast food and fast casual won't transfer — the pace, the plating, and the scratch cooking are different animals.
• Real knife skills. Not a nice-to-have here. It's most of your morning.
• The ability to read a recipe and hit it the same way twice.
• Two references from full-service kitchens.
• Able to lift 50 lbs and stand a long shift.
• Food Handler Certificate — required within 30 days of hire. We pay for it.

What you don't need

• German cooking experience. We'll teach you every dish on this menu. You need to want to learn it.
• A culinary degree.
• Prior management experience.
• The Ohio Manager Certification in Food Protection — but if you have it, say so, and if you don't, we'll put you through it.

Getting to $23 — and to Kitchen Manager

The raise isn't a review, it's a checklist. At 60 days:

• Ready to work at your scheduled start time, every scheduled day — apron on, knives out, on the line. Not walking through the door.
• You work a Saturday dinner service on the hot side without support
• You build and execute the daily prep list without the chef writing it for you
• Pars hold for a full week — no 5pm scrambles
• You've trained at least one new cook through a full station

Clear those and you're at $23. This is also the track to Kitchen Manager as we expand our hours this fall — we'd rather promote the person who already knows our kitchen than hire a stranger into it.

How hiring works here

1. Send a resume and two references.
2. A short conversation — in person, in the kitchen.
3. A paid working interview. One shift, at your hourly rate. You'll prep, you'll run a station, and something will go sideways because it always does. We pay you for the shift whether or not we hire you.

A few things to know up front

• We are a drug-free workplace. Pre-employment screening is part of hiring.
• We start on time. Ready at your start time means apron on and knives out, not coming through the door. Prep sets the whole day, and a late start costs everyone.
• Made from scratch means from scratch. If you've spent your career opening bags, this will be a real adjustment — a good one, but a real one.
• We've been here since 1983, family-owned, now run by the third generation. One of Cleveland's oldest and most authentic beer halls, with a German, Belgian, and American craft beer list to match. People come here for food that tastes like someone made it.

We've been here since 1983, family-owned, now run by the third generation. One of Cleveland's oldest and most authentic beer halls, with a German, Belgian, and American craft beer list to match. People come here for food that tastes like someone made it.