For Palo Alto resident Tambi Harwood, cooking help couldn't have come at a
better time. In 2002, she was pregnant with her first child and struggling to
run her family construction business. Stress was ever-present. Free time was
scarce. Even "nice dinners" consisted of Chinese takeout.
Then a friend gave Harwood a gift certificate to Dinner By Design, a personal
chef service from San Jose cook Michael Taravella. Over the next few months,
Taravella stopped by once a week to prepare a cache of home-cooked meals for
Harwood and her husband, Smitty, in their kitchen. Looking back, Harwood says
the gift changed the course of her pregnancy.
"It was just so nice to not have to think about cooking," she remembers.
"To get a nutritious and delicious meal without having to make time to
go out or cook it ourselves was such a stress-reliever."
As commitments mount and free time dwindles, more Peninsula residents are discovering
the gift of personal chefs. For anywhere from $150 to $500, these chefs cook
full, fresh meals in the privacy of your home -- wherever your home might be.
They shop for ingredients (some chefs include the cost of groceries in their
fee; others submit receipts to their clients for food purchased). They clean
when they're done. They even package the food in containers for easy reheating
during a busy week.
Perhaps most importantly, the chefs cater to customer likes and dislikes in
ways that restaurants could never dream. If your family likes its grits with
butter, they'll take care of it. If you prefer your salmon blackened while your
significant other likes it grilled, they'll do that, too.
"People go out to eat out of habit," says Taravella, who went to
cooking school in the early 1990s after he was laid off from a job at Lockheed
Martin Corp. "I like to show people that there's a better way to get what
you want and do it in a way that saves time." The personal chef phenomenon
is nothing new. Celebrities have used personal chefs for years, but the concept
took hold on a more general scale in the late 1980s, when a wave of professionally
trained chefs began leaving restaurants for the flexibility of cooking in more
intimate locales. Today, according to the United States Personal Chef Association
in Rio Rancho, N.M., there are more than 2,400 certified personal chefs across
the country, and 62 in the Bay Area.
Like Taravella, many of the local personal chefs are cooking up second careers
after stints in high-tech. Anne-Marie Abrigo, for instance, who runs a San Jose
chef service called Saving You Thyme, worked for Intuit, Oracle and PointCast
before a neck injury forced her to find another line of work. Mark Foy of Berkeley
was a computer consultant before taking culinary training in 1996 and launching
his vegan-only chef service company two years later.
Today most personal chefs on the Peninsula handle gift situations similarly.
Most gifts include a minimum of four complete meals, which includes four
entrees, eight side dishes, salad and dessert. Once a purchase has been
made, the chef contacts his customers and asks them questions to determine
their preferences and dietary restrictions. Do they eat meat? Are they
diabetic? Are they hopeless believers in the Atkins diet? "It was just so nice to not have to think about cooking"After a chef has determined what a gift recipient likes to eat, the chef
creates a menu and hits the supermarkets -- usually Whole Foods or Piazza's
in San Mateo, Lunardi's in Burlingame or Los Gatos and other gourmet shops.
Some chefs also use farmers' markets, particularly those in Half Moon
Bay, San Jose and at the Ferry Building in San Francisco. The last step
in the process, of course, is the cook day. California law prevents chefs from cooking food in their own homes and
delivering it elsewhere -- all food must be prepared in a commercial kitchen.
To get around this, many chefs bring bags full of ingredients to customers'
homes and cook on-site. Most meals take two to five hours to prepare,
and most chefs cook when their customers are out and about, or at work.
When they're done, the chefs package the meals individually and clean
up. "I try to be as unobtrusive as possible," says Gina DeSciscio,
a San Francisco chef who calls her service At the Dinner Table. "For
my clients, there's nothing like coming home to a clean kitchen and a
home-cooked meal." The benefits of personal chefs are not lost on Linda Yates. The CEO of
Burlingame consulting firm Strategos has received a variety of personal
chefs as gifts on a number of occasions, and has given chefs as gifts
to friends, colleagues and even the Mothers Club of Palo Alto and Menlo
Park. On one occasion, she purchased Taravella's Dinner by Design services
for a friend who was fighting cancer and was too weak to cook for herself. Bon appetit At the Dinner Table, San Francisco Dinner By Design, San Jose Nadine & Dane's Personal Chef Services Saving You Thyme, San Jose Vitalita Culinary Group, Berkeley United States Personal Chef Association, American Personal Chef Association, penfriday@sfchronicle.com |