Your First 90 Days as a Chef Abroad: What No One Tells You

Every guide about working abroad as a chef focuses on the same thing: getting hired. The CV, the visa, the negotiation, the contract red flags to check before you sign. All of that matters — but it's the easy part, in a way, because it has a finish line. You either get the offer or you don't.

What almost nobody prepares you for is what happens after you land. The first 90 days in a new kitchen, a new country, and often a new language are where international chef careers are actually made or broken. Here's what that period really looks like, and how to get through it well.

Week one: the honeymoon (and why it won't last)

The first few days almost always feel great. New kitchen, new ingredients, new city to explore on your one day off — everything is novel, and novelty feels like excitement. Psychologists who study expat adjustment call this the honeymoon stage, and it's a well-documented, near-universal pattern: high positivity and energy in the first weeks, driven by the sheer newness of everything, before the practical friction of daily life abroad starts to bite.

Enjoy it. But don't mistake it for how the whole posting will feel, and don't make any big judgments — about the kitchen, the country, or your own decision to move — based on week one alone.

Weeks two to six: the actual adjustment period

This is where reality sets in, and it's completely normal. Research on cross-cultural adjustment consistently shows a dip after the honeymoon phase, as the practical demands of language, unfamiliar systems, and daily logistics compound with the pressure of proving yourself in a new brigade. In a professional kitchen specifically, this shows up as very concrete stress: not knowing where anything is during service, mishearing instructions in a second language during a bilingual pass, not yet understanding the brigade's unspoken pecking order, or simply being exhausted by how much mental energy "normal life" now takes.

A few things help specifically in a kitchen context:

• Learn the kitchen's working language fast, even if you already speak the country's language. Every brigade develops its own shorthand — the way orders are called, the words used for stations and sections, the phrases the head chef uses when something's wrong. That's a second, smaller language to pick up on top of the country's actual language.

• Write everything down in your first two weeks. Mise en place structure, plating specs, allergen protocols, who to ask for what — a foreign kitchen moves fast and won't repeat itself for your benefit. Chefs who visibly take this seriously earn trust faster than chefs who try to look like they already know everything.

• Expect to be tested. Nearly every brigade — everywhere in the world — runs some version of testing the new hire in the first few weeks, whether that's a harder section, a busier shift, or just less patience than usual. It's not necessarily personal. It's how kitchens have always worked, and it passes once you've proven you can hold your station.

• Housing and admin will eat more energy than you expect. Opening a bank account, registering with local authorities, sorting a phone plan, finding your way around a foreign supermarket — all of this lands in the same six-week window as learning a new kitchen, and it's genuinely tiring. Budget real time for it rather than trying to squeeze it into days off around service.

Months two and three: finding your footing

By around six to twelve weeks, most chefs start to feel the shift — not because the country or the kitchen got easier, but because you did. You know where things are. You understand the rhythm of service. You've made at least one real friend or ally in the kitchen, which changes everything about how the job feels day to day.

This is also, realistically, when homesickness tends to peak for a lot of people — the initial adrenaline has worn off, but you're not yet fully settled either. It's worth naming that in advance, because chefs who expect it tend to handle it better than chefs who are blindsided by suddenly missing home three months into what's supposed to be the adventure of a lifetime.

Practical things that help in this window:

• Build a life outside the kitchen, deliberately. Chefs who only know their coworkers and their apartment tend to struggle more than chefs who've found one non-work anchor — a gym, a language class, a local market they visit every week.

• Keep in touch with home on a rhythm, not randomly. A regular call home tends to feel more stabilising than sporadic ones that only happen when you're already low.

• Revisit your reasons for coming. Whatever got you here — the money, the experience, the country itself — is worth actively remembering on the harder days, rather than only surfacing on the good ones.

Signs you're actually settling in (vs. signs it's the wrong fit)

Ninety days in, it's fair to take stock. Some genuine progress markers: you're no longer translating in your head before you speak, you have a rough mental map of your neighbourhood without needing your phone, at least one colleague texts you outside work, and service feels demanding but not disorienting.

Signs worth paying attention to instead: the kitchen environment itself is the problem rather than the adjustment — if red flags from your original contract review are now playing out in reality (unpaid overtime becoming the norm, promised housing not materialising, a visa sponsorship promise stalling), that's different from ordinary culture shock and worth revisiting our contract red flags guide against what you're actually experiencing.

The bottom line

Nobody arrives in a foreign kitchen fully ready for it, no matter how many stages they've worked or how well they researched the country beforehand. The first 90 days are supposed to be hard in places — that's not a sign you made the wrong call, it's the actual cost of the career you're building. Chefs who get through it well aren't the ones who don't struggle; they're the ones who expected to, and kept showing up anyway.

Still weighing where to go? Browse live international chef roles on ChefJobs Abroad — every listing links straight to the employer.

Related reading: How to Land Your First International Chef Job · Kitchen Culture Shock: How Cooking Differs Around the World · What Is a Stage? The Chef's Guide to Culinary Apprenticeships Abroad · Chef Contract Red Flags: What to Check Before You Sign

Sources: Peer-reviewed and applied research on cross-cultural adjustment (Oberg's U-curve model; Lysgaard's culture shock curve) as summarised by IESE Business School, MIT International Students Office, and relocation-industry guides (current as of mid-2026).