Germany's specialty-chef visa: bringing authentic Thai cuisine to your restaurant

A visa category built for specialty restaurants

Germany is one of the few EU countries with a visa route designed specifically for foreign-cuisine chefs: the Spezialitätenkoch permit under §11(2) of the Employment Ordinance (BeschV). It allows a specialty restaurant to employ a chef of the matching national cuisine on a full-time contract for up to four years, and it is a proven, stable channel that Thai restaurants across Germany have used for years. The constraint it addresses is one every operator in the segment knows without needing a statistic: a Thai kitchen stands or falls on someone who actually cooks Thai, and that person is the hardest hire on the floor.

Who qualifies

The rules are specific, which is good news, because they are checkable in advance. The qualification runs one of two ways: culinary training at a vocational school of at least two years plus at least two years of practical work in qualified establishments, or six years of professional practice as a cook. The six-year route is not a free alternative in the general case, it is accepted where the home country has no equivalent vocational school track, and in practice the German embassy in Bangkok asks Thai applicants for exactly that six-year record.

Two limits to plan around. The restaurant must genuinely be a specialty restaurant, with Thai cuisine at the core of the menu rather than a dish on it, and the Federal Employment Agency limits admissions to two specialty cooks per establishment, a cap that sits in its own guidance rather than in the ordinance text and that it can exceed in justified cases. The bigger one is on the way back: §11(3) BeschV bars a new approval until three years have passed since the previous residence title expired. That is a succession-planning fact, not a footnote. Four years of employment then a three-year gap for that individual means you plan the replacement well before the fourth year ends.

We verify each candidate’s training records and kitchen history in Thailand, cook-test them against your menu on video, and prepare the evidence file the German authorities expect: certificates, employment records, the restaurant’s own documentation.

Process on both ends

On the German side, the application runs through the Federal Employment Agency’s approval (Zustimmung) and then the national visa procedure at the German embassy in Bangkok. On the Thai side, the DOE process applies as with any legal placement: legalised demand letter, approved job order, medical checks, pre-departure training. The embassy quotes two to three months for a national visa as its general figure, and the employment approval sits upstream of that, so a realistic end-to-end estimate is three to five months. That is an estimate rather than an official combined figure; no authority publishes one.

Beyond chefs, two adjacent German routes are worth knowing. The §15d BeschV short-term quota carries 25,000 approvals a year and needs no formal qualification, which makes it useful for kitchen support and hospitality peaks. Read the detail before planning on it: it runs in two tracks, and Thai nationals use the one for visa-required countries, meaning up to eight months in any twelve with prior approval from the Federal Employment Agency, not the 90-day track open to visa-exempt nationalities. The employer also has to be bound by a collective agreement and pay the worker on its terms. The second route is the Skilled Immigration Act track for certified trades.