The busier we become, the more we look to others to help us simplify our lives. Services that might seem a luxury become easier to justify as a necessity.
We’ll hire a lawn service, maybe have someone come in to clean the house regularly and even drop the laundry off with the dry cleaning.
Now there’s a growing sector of service professionals available to help out with one of your most important daily duties: dinnertime. They’re called personal chefs, and they come into your home and cook your meals.
Oh, right, you’re thinking–I can have the chef bunk with the chauffeur in the rooms over the carriage house. But a personal chef is different from a private chef, and the cost is a lot less than you might imagine. Eric Kunichika, a Florida physician, and his wife, Deanne, a dentist, have used a personal chef for about 2 1/2 years. The client pays for all the food and seasonings Murphy purchases, and any items unused are left in the refrigerator. The cost of hiring a personal chef varies from one chef to another and depends on the situation–whether it involves cooking for a special occasion or with special ingredients, for instance. Dale Pyle, a part-time personal chef, says $15 to $20 per entree per person is typical.
And as Pyle says, “If you add up all the times you go out to eat, order in or stop at the drive-through, and the food you buy and throw out” because you never got around to cooking it and it spoiled, the cost is comparable to an average restaurant meal.
A personal chef differs from a private chef in that the latter is someone who is employed by one client and cooks exclusively for that individual or family. A personal chef works for several clients and is an independent contractor who owns his or her own business.
Murphy has worked as a private chef and also did time working the lines in the kitchens of well-known restaurants in South Florida. But he likes the independence–and the more reasonable hours–of working as a personal chef. “Quality of life factors into it,” he says.
More chefs are coming to that realization, according to Candy Wallace, executive director of the San Diego-based American Personal Chef Association. She says that when she started her organization 10 years ago, she knew of about 30 personal chefs. Those numbers are blooming. Her Web site, she says, gets about 1 million hits every month.
A personal chef usually will schedule an interview with a new client to assess likes and dislikes. There’s no sense in hiring your own chef if he or she makes food you don’t like. Two of Pyle’s clients, Ed and Phyllis Lower, keep a file labeled “Chef Dale” with notes on past meals. A note next to the stuffed pork loin notes it was good, but next to the chicken cacciatore they’ve written “bad.” Pyle says it doesn’t hurt his feelings to receive the negative feedback; he’d rather be cooking the things clients like.
Food fetish
An estimated 10,000 personal chefs are working in the United States, according to the American Personal Chef Association. To find a personal chef, visit www.personalchef.com.
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale (cdipasquale@tribune.com) and Victoria Rodriguez (vrodriguez@tribune.com)
