Join us for our open evening at Leiths on Wednesday 13 May 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 Wednesday 13 May 2026, 6.30–8.30pm, and discover how the Culinary Diploma can launch your career in food.
Training on the Culinary Diploma opens doors well beyond restaurant kitchens, as some of the attendees at our recent Careers Fair prove. Among the array of industry professionals were a number of Leiths graduates, including George Cavendish, Anushka Magan and Jess Mackintosh – a former yacht chef turned entrepreneur, a recipe development manager and a food stylist respectively. We asked them how training at Leiths was the perfect proving drawer for their chosen career in food.
Anushka Magan is recipe development manager at HelloFresh, having graduated from the Culinary Diploma in 2019. Before her current role, she freelanced for Olive magazine and BBC Good Food, and worked as a home economist and private chef.
‘My training at Leiths was the leaping point for the start of my career in food. I was doing something completely different before coming to Leiths and it really gave me an amazing foundation.’
The skill she values most: critical tasting. ‘That’s really important in my role as a recipe developer. We really need to be able to critically taste our recipes, our colleagues’ recipes and make suggestions for improvements. I think we really learnt that skill while we were here.’
Her advice to current students: ‘Have belief in yourself. You’ve got the skills and the knowledge that you’ve learnt here at Leiths. Keep grafting and keep following your dreams and you’ll get to where you want to be.’
George Cavendish, who trained on the Leiths Culinary Diploma in 2011, now works across private households in London, Scottish estates and the Cotswolds. His route included restaurants and his own venture, before four years in yachting.
‘You travel the world, you get paid incredibly well to do it, you work with a great bunch of people from all over and you get to cook with exceptional ingredients. I called my galley the playroom because I could do what I liked.’
What distinguished his training was depth over repetition. ‘The best thing I learnt at Leiths is the ‘why’. I came to Leiths with four or five years of restaurant experience behind me and really enjoyed learning the ‘why’. The theory behind ‘why’ you’re doing things is taught really well at Leiths.’
Jess Mackintosh graduated from the Culinary Diploma in 2019 and now works across television including Saturday Kitchen, Cooking with the Stars, MasterChef and Studio Ramsay, alongside commercial clients such as Heinz, Good Food, Olive, Cafe Nero and Nando’s.
She came to Leiths at 32, working as a kitchen porter at weekends to cover expenses. ‘I took a real punt on coming to Leiths. I put all my spare money into coming here.’
Within two weeks of graduating, she was teaching at Leiths whilst building her freelance career. She’s since worked with Mary Berry and, having done work experience at Saturday Kitchen at Leiths in 2019, this year, she led for the first time.
‘What sets me apart from the crowd is I can fix something really quickly if it goes wrong and that stems from all of the teaching and the foundations Leiths gives you. It’s the firefighting. And it’s especially useful for live TV.’
