The life of a personal chef is one filled with unforgettable experiences. Living life alongside some of the world’s most renown celebrities means you’re traveling, cooking with the best ingredients, and making memories the average person could only dream of. Some personal chefs have opened up about their crazy celebrity-filled careers and spilled some serious gossip about stars we know and love. (That is, if they’re allowed to name names).
Working for a high-profile clients can be stressful, to say the least.
Many celebrities follow strict diets, schedules, and have an entire crew of people whose job is to keep this one person together and functioning. Some chefs have been pulled in and spit out of the celebrity machine, whereas others have become members of the family. It all depends on the celeb in question and their attitude toward “the hired help.”
Being a personal chef is something we prrroooobably could never do (although, never say never). The tension is way too high and the schedules are seemingly incredibly nutty. However, these below chefs have mastered the art of cooking for the stars and have shared some of the funniest, strangest, and very honest truths they experienced and learned from their time in famous people’s kitchens.
Are you ready for this?
1. Most celebs are “fussy eaters.”
Clancy Atkinson cooks for A-list celebrities, billionaires, and fashion designers — and all of them are pretty picky about what goes on their plate.
“All of my clients are fussy eaters in the sense they know what they want,” Atkinson told Vogue in 2016.
“I always ask my clients to tell me immediately if I make something they don’t like and I’ll prepare them something else.”
2. Gwyneth Paltrow eats “nothing.”
Kate McAloon has been a private chef to the stars for well over a decade, with her first celeb clientele being Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally. McAloon worked for the then-married couple Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin afterwards, around 2007.
“I had a brief from their assistants,” McAloon told News.com.au in 2017, “They eat nothing. They are very strict. They avoided any sugars, anything sweet, no dairy, just more vegetables.”
However, McAloon said she began adding more ingredients into her meals. “[Paltrow and Martin] said ‘Your food is getting better.’ That’s what happens when you eat more than grass,” McAloon joked.
3. Rihanna is a “moody eater.”
“[With previous clients] I would send in a menu on a Sunday or Monday and they would pick for the week, and then I’d be able to shop and prep,” Solomon told Bon Appétit, “but this is nothing like that.”
Chef Solomon said that Rihanna is a “moody eater,” and her appetite fluctuates.
“We don’t know what we’re gonna want to eat tomorrow, so why even pick today?” she said.
4. Mother always knows best.
Rihanna’s personal chef, Debbie Solomon, needed to learn how to make some of the star’s most-loved Barbadian and Guyanese dishes, but that’s easier said than done.
Rihanna’s mom actually had to show Solomon the ropes, according to Bon Appétit.
“It was just, like, her mom coming up and saying, ‘This is how we make it,’” Solomon said.
5. One must never speak to (the late) Prince unless spoken to.
Margaret Wetzler was fresh out of culinary school when she was hired as Prince’s private chef.
As one would expect, Prince was a man of mystery and ate at odd hours of the day.
Wetzler had to be on call 24/7 and was instructed by one of the singer’s three assistants, “not to speak to Prince unless spoken to.” However, Wetzler told Food & Wine in 2016 that Prince was polite and always introduced her to his guests, even though he didn’t know a thing about her.
6. Prince was sometimes unknowingly served store-bought food.
Wetzler admitted that, because Prince was so unpredictable, she sometimes had to buy and serve pre-made food to him and his guests. For example, he once asked for a birthday cake at 11 p.m., so Wetzler had to grab one from the store.
Another time, Prince wanted to host a traditional English tea party in an hour’s time…
So Wetzler had to outsource the scones and cucumber sandwiches before guests began to arrive.
7. The private chef life is not glamorous.
“Sure, the job involves travel to amazing places, luxury villas, private jets and super yachts but in reality I’m on call 24/7 and usually spend 15-plus hours a day in the kitchen,” Atkinson confessed to Vogue.
“My clients usually request breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks, so the day consists of early starts and late finishes. The only break is usually a mad dash to the local market for supplies.”
8. Miranda Kerr sticks to an “80/20 rule.”
Chef McAloon also worked for Miranda Kerr and Orlando Bloom for a period of time, during which McAloon learned that Kerr avoids any foods with chemicals. Even though Kerr, a world-renown fashion model, sticks to a strict diet, she follows an “80/20 rule.”
McAloon said to News.com.au, “she has the 80/20 rule that she sticks to — so eating healthily 80 percent of the time and having a treat the other 20 percent.”
9. Privacy is of the utmost importance.
A private chef who asked to remain nameless told HuffPost in 2017 that, despite living in some of the most beautiful places in the world, the celebs he’s worked for rarely leave the house.
And sometimes, they don’t even want his staff around.
“They choose these really fancy homes because they spend all their time there avoiding paparazzi,” he said. “For more privacy, some people even request food they can reheat themselves so my staff doesn’t actually have to be there when they eat it.”
10. Many private chefs must become “invisible.”
Former personal chef to Billy Corgan from The Smashing Pumpkins, Kat Turner, explains on The Lonely Hour podcast that she had a great experience cooking for Corgan and the band. However, her next private chef job was a far cry from pleasant.
Working for a mega movie star meant Turner was barely sleeping while the actress was shooting her film and scheduling was tight.
“I couldn’t come out and ever publicly say, ‘I work for this person.’ And I could never do an interview talking about working for that person or some other people that I work for,” Turner explained. She said that some of her clients were very private and, in a lot of ways, Turner almost needed to disappear in order to keep the tabloids off her back. “I was invisible,” Turner said. “As invisible as I could be publicly.”
Furthermore, Turner confessed that she felt as though she lost a bit of her personality while working as a private chef for some celebrities. She became a cog in the machine.
11. For some, presentation is everything.
Chef Richard Ingraham whips up meals for A-listers and top notch celebrity athletes, some of whom request restaurant-quality food, with perfect presentation. “On one hand, you have clients who are big on restaurant-quality dishes with great presentation,” Ingraham told Best Health.
“Then you have the client who just wants great food that they just don’t have to worry about making themselves.”
12. Former President Obama credits pasta for his 2012 reelection.
“We were heading to the second debate,” Sam Kass, the former White House chef who cooked for the Obama family for six years, told Food & Wine in March. “Pressure was up, because it was debatable who had performed better in the first debate. The press gave it to Romney of course. And they said if he won the second, Barack was in trouble. So, it was kind of an intense time for us.”
Kass said that when Obama nailed his second debate, he credited Kass’ chicken and pesto pasta dish, now dubbed “POTUS’s Lucky Pasta.”
Kass had whipped it up in the galley kitchen of Air Force One in during the 2012 election cycle. You can grab the recipe from Kass’s cookbook, Eat a Little Better.
13. The richer the client, the nicer they treat their staff.
The unnamed chef told HuffPost, “Usually, the clients with the most money are actually the coolest and most down to earth. It’s the ones that are in between — the ones [who] aren’t billionaires, but are just ‘average rich’ — that act like dicks.”
They continued, “They act like they have to prove they are better than other people. But real billionaires tend to treat us like normal humans. When you have millions and billions of dollars, you don’t care about proving how rich you are.”
14. The entourage can be worse than the client.
The same unnamed chef of the stars told HuffPost that he rarely has rude clients.
However, their friends are a different story.
“Rude clients are relatively rare,” he said. “But on a couple of occasions, I’ve had the entourage be more rude than the actual celebrity. The worst part is when they show that they don’t care for us or what we’re doing for them.”
He said he would sometimes arrive in the morning to a kitchen littered with cigarette and joint butts — sometimes scattered on the food he had prepared.
15. Sometimes you have to trick celebs into eating their veggies.
Ingraham told Best Health that some of his clients aren’t the biggest fans of vegetables. So, in order to sneak the nutrients into their diet, he often purees veggies and hides them within the meal.
16. “The more money they have, the more absurdity they express.”
According to chef Jaqueline Raposo, who wrote about her high-earning clientele in a 2016 piece for Delish, one of her LA-based celebrity chef peers once said, “I work with a bunch of absurd people, and the more money they have, the more absurdity they express.”
He gave an example of a client who asked him to cook a meal for him in his bedroom while he was having sex.
“I was like, Fine, no problem. I have no boundaries — whatever you can afford, I can cook,” the anonymous chef said.
17. It’s a lot of work to gain a client’s trust.
Chef Lauren Gerrie, who cooked for designer Marc Jacobs, told Cosmopolitan in 2016 that gaining the trust of clients is no easy task.
It took several years to build a relationship with Jacobs so he would trust her taste and ideas.
“Initially, [Jacobs] was kind of like, ‘This is what I like to eat,'” so I was consistent with what I was making and made sure the flavors were always the same. Now, he really trusts me, and he really gets excited when I bring new flavors or new ingredients into the mix. When I started, he wasn’t eating any fish; now he eats fish all the time!”
For the most part, these personal chefs have enjoyed their time in the perimeter of the spotlight. And when you think about it, they’re pretty much the true stars of the show.
