Join us for our Open Evening at Leiths on Thursday 12th March 2026, 6:30–8:30pm, and discover how the Culinary Diploma can launch your career in food.
Join us for our Open Evening at Leiths on Thursday 12th March 2026, 6:30–8:30pm, and discover how the Culinary Diploma can launch your career in food.
Teacher? Lou (and she was amazing / the best pastry chef!)
Course? Full Year Diploma 23/24
Best moment? Dinner parties with my class!
Worst moment? ‘Dispatching’ a lobster!
Favourite demonstration? Game demonstration
Favourite dish? Wishbone Tomato Galette
“I was back from travelling thinking “Aghhhh, what am I going to do?”.”
“One morning, I discovered Leiths through The Crew Chef’s Youtube channel. I read about the diploma programme and really liked the teaching style compared to other schools. The start dates for the foundation term aligned perfectly and everything else just fell into place!”
Mia colours in day-to-day life as a Leiths diploma student.
“Morning demonstrations kicked off with a cup of tea, grabbing a front-row seat and tasting some amazing dishes that we’d later recreate.”
“We spent the afternoon putting what we’d learned into practice. The day wrapped up with feedback, clean-up and packing up any leftovers to take home. And then it was back at it the next day!”
I’m struck by the fact Mia doesn’t seem daunted by things getting a little crazy. Every Thursday, after a day at Leiths, she “hopped on the 94 bus and went over to do a 6-10pm shift at one of Ben Tish’s restaurants.” The Diploma is an intense year as it is, but she also took shifts as a KP at Leiths. I get the sense that her work ethic, then and now, is admirable.
Since graduating from Leiths, Mia stresses to me just how much Sarah Keene (who heads up the brilliant Leiths List recruitment agency) has been “sorting me out with jobs!” She tells me one of the best things about her year on the diploma was learning about “all the weird and wonderful jobs I never knew existed before Leiths.”
Indeed, the variety of jobs she has landed with Keene’s help is impressive. Mia has been part of the team at plant-based company BOSH! undertaking a 42-recipe development project for a cruise line. She has dispatched live lobsters for high-net-worth private clients acknowledging she “one hundred per cent would not have had the confidence to tackle that if it weren’t for my training at Leiths (or without Michael’s skills videos on repeat in the background)”. The comment about the skills videos is, I think, universally relatable for any fresh out of the box Leiths graduate.
On a similar note, she tells me a story of urgently texting Leiths friends from a French food market for artichoke related advice. It raises a valid point about just how interwoven life on the Diploma and life after tends to be. Mia also spent part of her graduate summer in Scotland as a baker at Ballintaggart Farm – which was set up by Leiths alumnus Chris Rowley who, like our interviewee, was also a career changer.
I ask about the difference between her life before and after Leiths. Moving away from the “repetitive nature of financial consultancy”, these days Mia isn’t fazed by “22 days of work on the trot because work is different every day.”
During our call, Mia is mid-house move surrounded by packed boxes but also, I sense, by ideas about where her career after Leiths might take her.
“Writing a cookbook or developing a product that you’d see on supermarket shelves is a pipe dream.” I imagine, working at the pace Mia has been since graduating, it won’t be long before those dreams become a reality.