What are the responsibilities and job description for the Prep Cook / Chef's Assistant — Private Events position at Slate at Founders Tower?
This is a foot in the door, not a dead-end prep job
Slate is a private event venue on the 20th floor of Founders Tower — weddings, holiday parties, corporate dinners, and a weekly cocktail night. Every event is catered in house by Chef Clayton Scherer, and the food is one of the main reasons clients book us.
Right now the chef does nearly all of it himself. We're looking for the person who changes that.
You'd start where everyone starts: prep, cleaning, setup, breakdown. But the job has somewhere to go. The goal — and we mean this as a plan, not a nice line in an ad — is for you to become the chef's right hand, and eventually to run small catering for an event at Slate with little to no supervision from the Chef.
How fast that happens is up to you.
It's earned, not scheduled.
What you'd actually do
Day one
- Prep work: knife work, mise en place, portioning, par stock
- Keeping the kitchen clean — properly clean, not passably clean
- Opening and closing duties, start to finish, on a checklist
- Receiving and putting away deliveries, rotating stock, labeling and dating
- Plating support and running food during service
- Breaking down and resetting the kitchen after every event
As you earn it
- Running prep for an event on your own from the chef's spec
- Ordering and par-level management
- Leading the back of house during service
- Eventually: operating a catering event at Slate end to end
Who we're looking for
- You genuinely like cooking. Not "I need a job" — you cook at home, you watch, you ask questions, you want to get good.
- You show up when you say you will. In this kitchen that is most of the job.
- You keep a clean station without being asked twice.
- You can lift, stand and move for a full event, and you can work evenings and weekends — that's when events happen.
- You take correction well. The chef will tell you straight; that's how you learn fast.
Experience helps. It isn't required. If you've worked a line, a prep kitchen, a catering gig or even a busy dish pit and you want more, we want to talk. If you've never worked in a professional kitchen but you cook constantly and you're serious, tell us that in your application — we'll read it.
No food handler permit? We'll get that sorted.
What we offer
- A real path from prep to running events, with the owner and the chef both invested in it
- Training directly from a private chef who builds custom menus — you learn how food gets sold, not just cooked
- Part-time to start, moving to full-time as the event calendar fills
- A beautiful room to work in. Twentieth floor, skyline on three sides.
- A small team where what you do is visible
The practical bits
Schedule
Event-driven: mostly evenings and weekends, with prep days during the week
Hours
Part-time to start, 10–30 hours a week, growing to full-time
Pay
$15 – $22 per hour, depending on experience
Reports to
Chef Clayton Scherer
Location
5900 Mosteller Drive, Suite 200, Oklahoma City, OK 73112
How to apply
Send a resume if you have one. If you don't, send us a few sentences: where you've cooked, what you cook at home, and why this one.
Then tell us one dish you're proud of and how you make it. That tells us more than a resume does.
Apply here, or email clayton@slatevenue.com
Pay: $15.00 - $22.00 per hour
Expected hours: 10.0 – 30.0 per week
Work Location: In person
Salary : $15 - $22