The Queen is looking for a new sous chef

It's not very often that you'll see an offer to work for the royal family in any capacity at all, let alone be one of the Queen's chefs. This is exactly what's happening right now though, as the British royal family have a vacancy in their kitchen staff that needs filling!

The royal family is looking for a sous chef who will mainly be based in Buckingham Palace, although travel to other royal residences will be required whenever necessary. "You’re an experienced and qualified chef with a background in premier catering, looking to take on a new challenge," reads the job posting. "You’ll have a thorough knowledge of the food industry and are trained in classical French cuisine, and you’ll be confident planning and developing menus for a wide range of occasions, including volume catering."

"Strong leadership skills will be absolutely vital," the job posting continued. "It’s essential that you can plan, organise and delegate effectively, and also that you can motivate and develop those around you. With excellent communication skills, you’ll have the ability to establish and maintain effective working relationships with your colleagues around the organisation."

This full-time position comes with 33 days' annual leave (including Bank Holidays), 15% pension contributions and free meals whilst working. If the potential candidate is successful, they'll also have the option of actually living in Buckingham Palace with all meals provided. Getting to be one of the Queen's chefs and living in the Queen's actual house with all your food provided for you? That sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me!

Should you want to apply for the job, you might want to do a bit of background research into the Queen's dietary preferences. Fortunately, that's something that's already been discussed in detail by previous royal chefs! "For a main course she loved game, things like Gaelic steak, fillet steak with a mushroom whisky sauce, especially if we did it with venison," said Darren McGrady to Hello! Magazine. "For a first course she loved the Gleneagles pâté, which is smoked salmon, trout and mackerel. She loved using ingredients off the estate and so if we had salmon from Balmoral from the River Dee, she'd have that, it was one of her favourites."

"We used a repertoire of dishes, mainly British and French food. We cooked a lot of traditional French food like halibut on a bed of spinach with a Morney sauce."

The Queen is also a massive chocoholic, according to McGrady. "Anything we put on the menu that had chocolate on, she would choose, especially chocolate perfection pie."