Job Ref: COL1234
Branch: The Horniman Café
Location: The Horniman Café, London (South East)
Salary/Benefits: £15.50 per hour
Contract type: Permanent
Hours: Full Time
Hours per week: 48
Posted date: 17/06/2026
Closing date: 19/07/2026
Colicci is a family-run hospitality brand, proudly serving London’s Iconic green spaces. Our Dulwich Park café is a vibrant destination for locals and visitors, known for its fantastic coffee, freshly made food, and, of course, incredible pizzas.
We're looking for a hands-on Sous Chef to support our kitchen leadership team across 5 sites in the South East London area. Ensuring consistency in food quality, standards, and performance. The role acts as a flexible resource to cover holidays, support peak trading periods, new openings, and strengthen underperforming kitchens.
If you’re a natural, adaptable leader with a zest for hospitality, this is your chance to make your mark in a fast-paced, people-first environment.
What You’ll Be Doing:
- Leading the kitchen – ensuring smooth operations and maintaining top food quality.
- Bringing energy – managing operations efficiently and proactively.
- Building mentoring your team – developing skills, training chefs and ensuring high standards.
- Managing stock suppliers – maintaining fresh ingredients and controlling costs.
- Ensuring excellence in hygiene safety – upholding the highest kitchen and food safety standards.
- Collaborating with the General Manager – driving the café’s success through an outstanding food offering.
What We’re Looking For:
- Provide hands-on BOH leadership support across 5 sites.
- Cover Head Chef / Sous Chef absences.
- Support new openings, menu rollouts and peak trading periods.
- Ensure consistency in food quality, specs, and brand standards across sites.
- Drive compliance: Food Safety, HACCP, allergen procedures and audit readiness.
- Support kitchen teams with training, coaching and performance improvement.
- Work closely with Operations Managers and Head of Food on site performance.
- Assist with stock control, ordering, GP protection and waste reduction.
- Act as a “troubleshooter” for sites requiring immediate operational support.
- Flexiblity to align working pattern with business needs, including peak trading periods; weekends and school holidays
- Adaptability to work across multiple sites rather than a single location
Why Join Colicci?
Please note that unfortunately this role does not qualify for visa sponsorship. Applicants must have an existing right to work in the UK that does not require sponsorship.
Ready to Lead Something Special? We’d love to hear from you.
Our first cafe in the Colicci collection to be connected to a museum. We are thrilled to have partnered with the Horniman Museum and Gardens to operate their cafe space alongside the Bandstand kiosk situated in the gardens. The Horniman Museum and Gardens opened in 1901 as a gift to the people in perpetuity from tea trader and philanthropist Frederick John Horniman, to ‘bring the world to Forest Hill’. Today the Horniman has a collection of 350,000 objects, specimens and artefacts from around the world.
The interior scheme references the heritage features of the original architecture by Charles Harrison Townsend with a contemporary, timeless approach synonymous with the established Colicci cafe style.
Opened in 1901, the original Horniman Museum building is a unique example of the “Modern Style”. The limestone “Tree of Life” motif, as an emblem of nature in design, provided inspiration for The Horniman Cafe’s bespoke metalwork screen. This surrounds a set of new island booth seats to the centre of the cafe, upholstered using recycled wool fabric. Foresso Timber features once again for the Colicci cafe table tops. The sustainable timber terrazzo material captures waste timber to create a natural and textured finish. The central floor has received an eco Cork finish which is carbon negative and also has acoustic properties to allay noise levels in the bustling cafe
