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Naples Daily News
November 11, 2006
by Harriet Howard Heithaus
Personal chefs winning a place in local hearts — and stomachs — with planned nutrition, poolside fetes
The evening meal stands as a sacred institution around the globe. But in this millennium it falls flat in shopping time, preparation, organization, cleanup and — when we're running late — nutritional value.That's why personal chefs are a fast-growing kitchen staple in the U.S. Southwest Florida numbers are elusive, but its virtues are being tapped on both ends of the dining spectrum, for totally different needs.
"We don't have to worry about reservations at a restaurant. We don't have the parking worries. And we can relax and enjoy the evening with our guests," says Margret Prutting, who brought in one of Naples' newer personal chefs, Heinz Remmel of Gourmet a la Maison, to handle a dinner party for five at her home.
Her husband is happy to lose the late-dinner lull at restaurants.
"There's only so much you can talk about in a restaurant until you reach that point when you've got to admit it — the dinner is way overdue and the service just isn't there," says Dick Prutting. "This way, the dinner is ready when we are."
For Teresa Sievers M.D. and her husband, Mark, a personal chef keeps their time and family nutrition on track. The Estero couple work with Beverly Watson-Horsted, a Cape Coral chef with a degree in nutrition, to propose, prepare and store five days' worth of meals each week.
"There was just a lack of time," Mark Sievers explains. "We found ourselves rushing around and not getting the kind of nutritional value we wanted for our daughter. We were eating out a lot."
Restaurant meals were especially hard for Sievers' wife and daughter, Josie, who are vegetarians. When they decided to hire a chef, they also opted for organic ingredients.
Personal chefs differ from private chefs, who cook solely for one family, in that they cook a single meal or a predetermined number of weekly meals for various clients. If $280 a week sounds expensive for Watson-Horsted's estimate of five-day service for two without special diet needs, she suggests people consider putting dollar amounts on the alternatives. There's the cost of the time to shop and prepare; the cost of wasted and unused groceries; or the costs of dining out.
"The scenario now is too much that the woman works all week, then she goes shopping on the weekend and buys all this food, but doesn't have time to prepare it. That's wasted money," says Watson-Horsted.
Frozen foods are quick and convenient, she says, but costly per ounce, and the chemical content can run into a scary number of multisyllabic words.
"If you would spend two hours making a meal, that's 10 hours of quality time outside the kitchen," declares the Web site of Jose Aviles, chef-owner of Chef to My Door in Fort Myers. The tourist season in Southwest Florida exacerbates that, making meal hour at restaurants a literal feeding frenzy, he adds.
Yet Aviles says people often have the idea that a hired chef is only for Cordon Bleu fare. The veteran of Bonefish Grill says his most popular entree, especially among families with children, is meat loaf.
Watson-Horsted says she encounters the attitude that personal chefs are a status symbol.
"It's like 'that's for Oprah,' or something," said Watson-Horsted. "They don't understand it's fresh food. It's more nutritious. You're saving money."
The precision feast
An athletic perfectionist, Remmel is a dragonfly in flip-flops and T-shirt zipping into the Fresh Market to buy same-day-fresh produce for the Pruttings' dinner. He hovers, staring intently at the wine rack for a special bottle that doesn't appear, then zooms off to the bakery.
He'll go elsewhere for that last bottle of wine, but haricots verts, those slender children of string beans, make it into the cart. So do fresh blueberries; strawberries, red raspberries; and a polished, crusty stick of French bread. Only, of course, after another intense appraisal of the bakery.
To Remmel and other personal chefs, a fine dinner requires the right tools, but the homeowner isn't required to own them. Two weeks before the dinner, he's with Margret Prutting, deciding what dishes he needs to tote in. For this evening, it's his own trusted coffee maker and salad tools.
"But we use the homeowner's own china silver and glasses. And we wash everything up. By hand. We leave the kitchen the way we found it," says Remmel. It's a pledge other personal chefs echo.
Remmel, a native of Germany, is a veteran of dining rooms at Turnberry Isle, the Savoy Hotel in Dusseldorf and Chez Bardet in Montreal. He owned his own restaurant and worked as a personal chef in Atlanta for 14 years, and now specializes in a five-course menu of continental dishes that he can time to a millisecond.
Remmel's insistence on the best has sunk nearly the cost of a Prutting dinner into chanterelles. His initial provisioner told him five days before the dinner that the crop they were supplied was too mushy to pass muster. Remmel had to have a second provisioner in Miami overnight him a crunchy-tender supply — for $120. Remmel's per-person charge for meals range from $150 to $200.
"But if I promise somebody, I have to get it, no matter what the cost," he says. Remmel and other chefs like Peter Hesse, an alumnus of Bear's Paw Country Club, say that word of mouth is powerful publicity.
"We're here, but you never see any ads for us," points out Hesse, a newly minted personal chef with the company name of My Take-Away Gourmet.
A dinner for five requires two in Remmel's entourage. Remmel arrives around 4 p.m., transformed, in immaculate chef's attire. By 7 p.m. Brigitta Robinson, a Newman's Deli manager who freelances as a chef's assistant, is cutting leeks into silky strips, producing olive oil on demand, pushing dishes in the oven and pulling them out as the courses proceed. Both speak fluent English, but their clipped communications in German accentuate the intensity of their work.
No one will know this at the elegantly set lanai table, where tidy bundles of prosciutto and ripe melon arrive shortly after the Pruttings, their niece, Elizabeth, and Nick and Lyn Jaksich are seated. As they dine, the kitchen is a hidden vortex of dishes, with filet mignon circling in and out of the oven to finish it at optimal doneness and temperature. As Robinson grates fresh Parmesan-Reggiano for the soon-served salad, Remmel melts butter to sauté his hard-found chanterelles with shallots.
"Now," he says with glee, "Let's get these bad boys cooking."
Remmel likes to limit the diners to between four and eight.
"Otherwise it's hoosh, hoosh, hoosh!" he declares, with a triple sweep of the arm.
He only sets the table if his clients request it. "They really know best how they want it to look," Remmel says.
When it comes to food, however, he sets the standards, and they're high. Remmel hand-whips heavy cream for a triple-fruit ice-cream dessert filigreed with a nougat syrup. But the grand finale is yet to come.
At the table, he produces glass coffee cups with powdered rims. They've been dipped in Mandarin Napoleon liqueur and sugar. Remmel sends a blue flame whirling inside the first cup, and the group reacts with a collective "Ah!"
Dinner for two, e-mailed
On a Tuesday, you'll find Watson-Horsted in her Dial-A-Cook whites at the Sievers home, so in control of the kitchen that when she orders the family's two affectionate dogs out, they meekly oblige.
The organic vegetarian menu she's prepared for the week of Nov. 6 includes a faux seafood paella and vegetarian Salisbury steaks. It's a nod to Mark Siever, the family's lone carnivore.
"He said he's very used to vegetarian eating and I didn't have to do that, but I like to make everyone feel there's something for them," Watson-Horsted explains.
Lined up on the kitchen counter are a troop of plastic containers, its smorgasbord of just-prepared entrees ready to be refrigerated or frozen. Watson-Horsted provides disposable bakeware — "After all, the idea is to free up their time" — but will use the customer's containers on request. Each is labeled with the contents and date. Sending out temptation from the opposite counter are a carton of her peanut butter brownies.
Each meal from Dial-A-Cook includes an entree, vegetable, starch, salad and dessert.
The nutritionist in Watson-Horsted won't let her unbundle meals. "I'm not going to leave them hanging (nutritionally)," she says. But Aviles gladly cooks four single entrees for a businessman who wants only four dishes per week.
"No salads, no sides," Aviles says. "But he's getting at least one nutritious meal a day."
An entree for two people for five days can run as low as $45 when Aviles is cooking. Some ingredients — seafood, for instance — and side dishes and desserts add layers of cost. Two couples or a family of four could pay as much as $285 for five days of full dinners, which breaks down to less than $16 a person per meal.
Like Watson-Horsted, Aviles will e-mail the proposed menu to his customers. It's rare that a change-order comes back; both insist on an initial 45-minute consultation with the family's decision maker before they start work. Watson-Horsted's questionnaire that includes segments on general ingredients such as nuts and oils, garlic, dairy, spices and grains as well as vegetables, fruits, seafood and meat.
"I could just offer them a menu and could say I can do this or this," says Watson-Horsted has a supply of tantalizing recipes from her Jamaican upbringing. "But that's not what this is about. It's about what the person I'm serving wants to eat."
She also handles dinner parties and special-event dinners. She recalls one husband buying a gift certificate for his wife for a special anniversary dinner for two.
"I came to the front door in my chef's clothes and handed her the envelope," she recalls, laughing. "She screamed. She loved it."
To book a cook
Most personal chefs require payment in advance of their services. That makes the question loom larger for the potential customer: What should a client look for in a personal chef?
— Referrals. Personal chefs interviewed for this story all said chefs should at least have written references from customers. It's helpful to be able to call several of them as well.
— Insurance. "You want people to be insured so that if something happens at a person's premise, they' covered," says Beverly Watson-Horsted of Dial-A-Chef in Cape Coral.
— Some history of training such as foodservice experience or training from either of the personal chef association programs. Food safety certification from the National Restaurant Association says that the chef has passed testing on some critical areas of foodservice safety.
Two trade associations, the U.S. Personal Chef Association and the American Personal and Private Chef Association, offer training and certifications and Web site links to their members.
— A connection, particularly if you're looking for a regular service. Most personal chefs interviewed say the client and chef need to be able to understand what each other's priorities are.
Personal vs. Private Chef: There's a difference
By Natalie Haughton, Daily News Food Editor
If a private chef is out of your league, consider hiring a personal chef.
"You don't have to be Oprah to have a personal chef," says Candy Wallace, founder and executive director of the San Diego-based American Personal & Private Chefs Association, which represents about 4,500 of the 9,000 working personal chefs in this country.
Personal chefs, estimated to be serving 72,000 clients in the United States, provide customized Monday-through-Friday meal support and convenience for busy people who don't have time to cook but prefer home-cooked meals prepared with fresh ingredients.
A personal chef usually works for several people, and shops and cooks numerous custom meals on an appointed day in a client's home kitchen. Once prepared, the entrees or meals are packaged and stored in the refrigerator or freezer with instructions so the client can heat them before serving. The chef cleans up and leaves the kitchen as he or she found it.
Many regular clients of personal chefs also hire them to cater small dinner parties and events, says Wallace, co-author of the just-released book "The Professional Personal Chef," written with Greg Forte (John Wiley and Sons; $50).
To serve multiple clients in a day and expand their businesses, some personal chefs are renting out and cooking in commercial kitchen space and delivering the meals.
Wallace says personal chefs charge an average of $200 to $400 a day (depending on level of culinary service) plus the cost of the food — which averages out to about $15 to $18 per person per entree. Typically, the chefs cook five different customized entrees for four people in a day.
For more information on personal and private chefs or to hire one, go to:
• American Personal & Private Chef Association
— www.personalchef.com; (800) 644-8389.
• Richard Florczak
— www.theprivatechef.com
Personal chefs cater to the time-starved
By Cindy Atoji, Globe Correspondent | March 4, 2007
Susan Yates of Lexington was tired of feeding her family pizza and Trader Joe's enchiladas every night, so she decided to "outsource" her cooking.
That meant hiring personal chef Andrea Silver, a move she says has saved her 10 hours a week because she doesn't have to grocery shop, chop vegetables, or stand over a hot stove.
"My kids used to eat a bagel or a protein bar in the back of the car while driving to dance lessons," says Yates, a senior vice president for global marketing at Bank of America. "Now we can actually sit down and have a meal together, even if it's only for a half hour."
Personal chefs like Silver, the proprietor of Sweet and Savory Personal Chef Services in Brookline, are no longer for just the rich and famous. Busy two-career families like the Yateses, people with restricted diets, single professionals, and seniors who can't cook for themselves are increasingly using the services of personal chefs , says John Moore, executive director of the United States Personal Chef Association .
He estimates there are 5,000 personal chefs nationwide, serving about 72,000 clients. In the Boston area alone, there are over 100 personal chefs.
Personal chefs are not to be confused with private chefs, who typically live in a client's home and cook for only one family, says Moore.
Personal chefs have numerous clients and are known for home-cooked meals that must be cooked in the client's kitchen, unless they are prepared in a commercially licensed kitchen. Their services can include customized menu planning and grocery shopping.
The best way to find a personal chef is online through associations such as Personal Chef Network (PersonalChefsNetwork.com), American Personal and Private Chef Association (PersonalChef.com), and the United States Personal Chef Association (USPCA.com) .
Pricing can vary . Some chefs will include groceries in a flat fee; others add groceries to labor charges, which are usually around $50 an hour.
The contract signed is a nonbinding service agreement with rules about cancellation and rescheduling.
The bottom line: Including groceries, personal chef service costs about $300 to $400 a week for four portions of five entrees and side dishes (known as a "five by four.") This is about 20 dinner-size servings or a price equivalent to your family eating out 4 to 5 nights per week at a family restaurant.
The chef usually packages the meals in disposable containers, vacuum-seal bags, or Pyrex for easy reheating or freezing.
There are no worries about cleanup, since the chefs bring their own supplies and clean up afterward, often "leaving the kitchen cleaner than it was originally," says Yates.
Janelle Marshall, a single mother of two in Methuen, says the price of hiring a personal chef is offset by cost by the time and irritation she saves by not having to deal with the "what's for dinner problem."
Marshall, who uses Chef en Route, which serves the Merrimack Valley, says she loves coming home to a bubbling crock pot or an elegant spread of mango salsa with tuna.
Marshall, who is a hairdresser in Salem, N.H., says, "My income is limited, but this is far better than going through a drive-through or having sandwiches for dinner. No more food on the run for us.
