Personal Chefs: How to hire, how much do they cost—and are they worth it?
Hiring a personal chef is a tough row to hoe. It is not as simple as cooking breakfast. You need to take care of many things before hiring a stranger who is going to take care of your kitchen. If you are an individual with a busy schedule of professional or social responsibilities, you already know how tough it is to manage the hectic routine outside the home and in the kitchen with the same pressure of responsibilities.
To hire a chef, you need to spare time for research and search for professional chefs, conduct interviews, do reference and background checks, and conduct testing sessions to see if the chef is genuine enough or knowledgeable. How to find a chef, and how would the costs impact your budget? Would it be worth hiring a personal chef or a private chef? If these questions are in your mind, this blog will help you find the right answers.
Everyone loves to eat healthy food. But in this fastly moving world, where you barely have time to prepare your healthy breakfast, you can think what it would take to prepare the food you love and the food that helps you to maintain your health. Maintaining work and kitchen at the same time is not a cup of tea for everyone. This is one of the primary reasons many homeowners like to hire a personal chef.
Getting the privilege of a great personal chef service reduces the stress of managing weekly groceries and preparation of 10+ dishes in an entire day to feed various members of your family. Having personal chef service is a boon during family celebrations instead of spending the majority of the time in the kitchen, you can spare quality time with the family and manage your guests with a warm heart. The personal chef or chefs you hired will look after your meals, breakfasts, diet, and everything related to food. You can sit back and relax when your kitchen is in safe hands.
Costs For Hiring a Personal Chef
Before jumping into the price structure of a personal chef, let’s first understand the difference between a private and a personal chef.
A private chef is one who works exclusively for a client and does not render services to other families or homes at the same time. A private chef is available for the most part of the day to take care of cooking needs for all family members. The chef takes care of groceries, stocking essential ingredients, and other work in the kitchen.
A personal chef is not hired on an exclusive basis for one family or home but renders services at different places. You might have a personal chef coming to your place for a fixed time interval during the day and manage everything for lunch and dinner. The individual will be working at other places too in a similar capacity.
The cost of hiring a private personal chef is definitely more than that of hiring a personal chef who works on-demand or for a fixed 1-2 hours. The former gets paid in a manner similar to an employee. The salary or monthly wages for the same job varies from one professional to another and depends on how many family members they are serving and the expertise and personal branding of the chef.
Personal chef services are usually charged on an hourly basis or on the quantity of work managed by the individual. A personal chef will charge extra for each additional work, such as meal planning and grocery shopping, and any number of dishes that are not part of the fixed work contract.
The costs or remuneration to be paid also vary with the experience of the chef, specialty in the menu, location of serving, and specialized services.
Is it Worth It?
Everyone wants to hire a personal chef who can look after the kitchen, fulfill all the food wishes and keep an eye on their health too. But wait! Is hiring a personal chef service worth it? You must be having all the advantages in mind, but what are the disadvantages you may face? Let’s talk about both to make your thoughts more clear.
PROS
1. Get Timely Meals
In the busy schedule where you barely have time for preparing breakfast, you can imagine how wonderful it would be if you have a chef who serves you the meal on time. A personal chef looks after your kitchen, and his or her first job is to serve delicious meals on time. After hiring the personal chef, you would never miss your meals in the hectic schedules. Your kitchen is taken care of, and you would be totally free from the cooking headache.
2. Manage Formal and Informal Home Events With Ease
Once you hire a personal chef, all the small gatherings and events can be managed easily. Hosting a small event is not an easy pissy job. You need to manage all the stuff including decoration, organization and the most important food. It does not make sense that you are sweating in the kitchen, and your guests are left to entertain themselves. Once you hire a personal chef, your kitchen is going to be taken care of, and you would be able to spend some quality time with family and guests.
3. Improved Meal Planning and Grocery Management
Personal chefs have expertise in managing the kitchen. After all, it’s their job. They know every detail of your kitchen and manage it the best. They know the taste and preferences of each member of your family, they are aware of your likes and dislikes. Hence, they can help you in planning meals for the day and week.
Being experts, they may offer many options in meal planning and help you to have the best for yourself. They even help in managing the grocery on a regular basis. They know when to buy, from where to buy, perks on buying, and most importantly, maintain a food budget. You don’t have to worry about groceries if you hire a personal chef who has expertise in such management.
4. Find Time For Alternative Career, New Hobbies, Being with Family, etc.
Healthy cooking takes time. You need to manage a lot more before planning your meals. But if you hire a personal chef, you would be able to focus on some new projects.
You would be able to utilize the time available in some productive alternatives you are dreaming of. You can focus on your hobbies and find opportunities to spend quality time with your family. Personal chefs make it possible just by managing all the stuff of your kitchen, starting from menu planning to buy groceries, preparing meals, and cleaning the kitchen.
CONS
1. Increase in Monthly Costs
Everyone wants to have delicious food, follow the diet, maintain health, and get the meals on time. All the requirements can be managed just by hiring a personal chef. But to enjoy such things, one has to pay some amount. After all, there are no free lunches. Hiring a chef may increase your monthly expenditure. Further, the cost depends on the menu, location, frequency of meals, and other expenses of the chef.
2. Unavailability at Times When You Depend on One
Sometimes, there are chances that you may not get any chef on time. Just imagine that you are planning to organize a small gathering or inviting a client at home for a business meeting, and your chef is not available to take care of your kitchen. The situation may put you under stress. There are also possibilities that a chef you have booked in advance may turn out at the last minute. It’s always tough to manage last-minute activities.
How to Find the Right-Fit Personal Chef For Your Home
Finding the right chef is not like walking in the park. It takes time and lots of effort. You need to check his or her reliability, identity, budget, and skills.
Here we have mentioned the activities involved in finding or hiring a personal chef that fits your requirement.
1. Place an Advertisement
One of the first ways to find a personal chef is by placing an advertisement. You can share your requirements on social media or post an ad in a newspaper or magazine. To get the best one, you should mention your criteria, state clearly what you are looking for, what is your budget, time period, and job location.
When you start receiving applications, you will need to carefully study each one, do a reference check, and conduct some interviews. You will have to handle the background check, documentation checks, etc.
2. Word-of-Mouth Recommendations
Sometimes referrals or recommendations work too. Ask your neighbors and colleagues to suggest some of the best chefs they have ever hired. You may get many references from your family and friends too. Later on, you can shortlist the one who fits your criteria.
An advantage of word-of-mouth recommendations is that people share names based on their experiences. If you trust the person offering the referral or recommendation, you could rest assured that the individual recommended would be good too.
Another point worth noting: it is not necessary that the chef recommended by someone you trust would have excellent skills to satisfy your family’s culinary needs and preferences.
3. Search and Search Online
Another way to find a personal chef is by searching for personal chef services online. You can browse through the profiles of various individuals offering personal chef services in your city. Check their social media profiles, and narrow down on the names of those who meet your specifications.
A major disadvantage would be trust issues. As the person you are planning to hire might be totally unknown to you.
4. Hire Through an Agency
One of the best ways to hire a personal chef is using the services of a chef recruitment agency. As recruiting agencies are experts, they may help you in finding the one who fits your criteria and budget.
A good agency will have a strong talent database. The recruiter collects all the information of the chef and will do most of the initial interviewing. A chef recruiter digs into the candidate’s background and verifies the authenticity of all information provided.
Agencies can help you in managing last-minute changes and provide support around the time. Being experts, they can easily screen the best one and allow you to select the one who fits your criteria.
Alliance Recruitment Agency
Alliance Recruitment Agency has been helping homeowners find a personal chef for more than a decade. We have very robust and diverse talent pools databases as well as connections that enable us to assist you in hiring a chef from countries across four continents.
You can place 100% trust in our abilities to find a best-fit personal chef for you. Our recruiters will meet the trickiest of requirements, thanks to our wide network of talent access and the goodwill we have established in the market that attracts professionals or chef job seekers.
If you would like to hire a personal chef, let us assist you in finding one that makes a difference in your home life.
