Culinary Careers: How to Get Your Dream Job in Food With Advice From Top Culinary Professionals by Rick Smilow; Anne E. McBride

Author:Rick Smilow; Anne E. McBride
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Industries, Cooks, Methods, Cookery - Vocational guidance, Food service, Cooking, Job Hunting, General, Travel & Tourism, Cooks - Vocational guidance, Food service - Vocational guidance, Business & Economics, Professional, Hospitality, Cookery, Careers, Vocational Guidance
ISBN: 9780307453204
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
Published: 2010-05-04T18:11:31+00:00

personal and private chefs

Personal chefs work for multiple clients, usually preparing a few meals at a time in the client’s kitchen or in a commercial kitchen and freezing them for the rest of the week. If you cook in their kitchen, expect to bring all your equipment with you, including reusable plastic containers and resealable plastic bags to store the food. You will typically spend just a few hours a week at one client’s kitchen, leaving you the opportunity to work for many at once. This freedom means that you can decide how many days a week you want to work and what income you want to have. The more clients you have, the more money you’ll make.

The American Personal & Private Chef Association reports that close to nine thousand personal chefs are in business, serving about seventy-two thousand consumers (the organization itself has about forty-five hundred members). The organization offers its members the opportunity to list their business on its website, which is an important source of client recruiting for personal chefs. Your own website and ads in local newspapers or on community websites are also ways through which you will find clients. Some of it takes place through word of mouth—your happy clients will recommend you to their friends. Keep in mind that expenses for advertising and publicity, organizational memberships, groceries, and travel are all part of the costs you will incur while running your business. As such, it is important that you factor them into the price that you charge your client.

“I love being creative. I love when I have a client who says, ‘I love everything, make me anything,’ and there are no restrictions. And I like the opposite end, when the clients enjoy a meal they didn’t think they could have because of their dietary restrictions.”

–SHERRI BEAUCHAMP

As a personal chef, you might deal with people who have dietary restrictions and find it too tedious to cook themselves. As such, knowing how to cook for people with food allergies will help develop your client base. You can acquire this knowledge through classes but mostly through plenty of reading. Because feeding people with such needs can be challenging, do not do it unless you are absolutely sure that you are up to the task. Other clients might be families that require you to cook different meals for each person, based on food preferences. You will usually submit menus to your clients, who will then pick what they want you to cook that week.

A private chef, in contrast, works for one family at a time, five or six days a week, and might even live with their clients. Their duties might go beyond cooking, from administrative work to dog walking. Mutual trust is an essential component of the relationship between chef and client since you are in their home all day, sometimes alone with their children, for example. You will be responsible for all grocery shopping, including staying within the budget decided upon with your client. The rewards,

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