Mary Beth Brinkerhoff, a mother of three who lives in Avon, is shopping at Wegmans across from the Marketplace Mall. Her cart overflows with fresh vegetables, packets of flash-frozen mahi-mahi, a family pack of boneless, skinless chicken breasts, milk, ready-made stock, and a tin of her preferred organic tomatoes. On the way to check out, she also grabs a 5 lb. bag of ice. "You never know...," she says to me as we head out to load four bags of groceries into her minivan.
Brinkerhoff is not taking all of these groceries home to cook for her family. She's taking them to the home of a client in Webster, for whom she is about to cook five separate meals of four servings each to be spaced out over the coming week - a five-by-four, in the parlance of her trade. The ice is for shocking vegetables, so that she doesn't have to empty all the trays in her client's freezer. Brinkerhoff, the owner of For Goodness Taste, Inc, is a personal chef who has been making home-cooked meals for a steady stream of clients in the Rochester area for the past two years. She's not alone.
According to Patti Battista, the president of the newly founded Western New York chapter of the United States Personal Chef Association and owner of the Rochester-based Delicious Gourmet personal chef service, there are at least 13 personal chefs active in the Rochester area. Nationwide, there may be as many as 6000 or more. The USPCA, the largest trade association for personal chefs, projects that that number could more than double in the next 10 years, adding an estimated $1 billion to the economy each year. This small trade group is well on its way to becoming a significant player on the culinary scene.
An outgrowth of the tech boom of the 1990's, personal chefs have brought an old service back to their clients. Many of these cooks have experience cooking in institutional settings, some of them learned to cook at home and have a lifelong passion for food, others have owned restaurants and catering businesses, and a small number have formal culinary degrees. What they do is bring "Cook," once the live-in companion to a housekeeper and a nanny, back into the home. Personal chefs work along the same lines as modern cleaning services. They come and go mostly while clients are out of the house and leave finished products behind them - a clean house in one case, a week's worth of meals in the other.
The big difference between personal chefs and the cooks of yesteryear is that being a personal chef can be a stepping stone to other endeavors. Because they make their own hours, and because they are the sole promoters of their businesses, personal chefs can respond quickly to new opportunities, and many of them have done so.
Working as a personal chef can be, as Paul Brescia, owner of 2 Dine 4 Personal Chef Service, puts it, a "vehicle to move forward" into other aspects of a culinary career. Erin Frost entered the field in 2007 and now offers home-baked cupcake bouquets for weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, and other special occasions, in addition to home-cooking services. Personal chefs Battista, Brinkerhoff, and Kathleen Krauss (owner of Savory Suppers personal chef service) all teach workshops at the Tops Cooking School on Mt. Read Boulevard. And the doyenne of Rochester's personal chefs, the Phantom Chef, Mary Lynn Vickers, still cooks for individual families, but in-home cooking demonstrations and custom dinner parties make up an increasing share of her clients.
Becoming a personal chef is not as easy as just hanging out a shingle. Personal chefs in Monroe County must obtain a Level 1 food safety certification, which they have to renew every five years, and a county-issued restricted catering license. The restricted catering license defines the primary differences between a person who cooks in a restaurant and one who cooks in someone's home.
Personal chefs are not allowed to prepare any food in advance - nothing. Everything has to be made from scratch on premises. Whatever appliances, pots, pans, knives, and utensils are in the house, for better or worse, are the tools the personal chef has to work with. Stoves with burners that do not work, ovens that do not heat, dull knives, inadequate pots and pans - these can be the bane of a personal chef's existence.
Where the restaurant cook usually has access to a six-burner range, multiple ovens, a broiler, and the luxury of someone to keep replenishing the supply of clean pots and pans, the personal chef does it all herself on four burners, with one oven, and whatever supplies are available. She does the prep work, the cooking, and the clean up, all in the space of four to six hours on site for each client. Five meals of four servings each, prepped, cooled, and stored is roughly equivalent to cooking at least one Thanksgiving dinner for each client, each cook day. This is not easy work, and adaptability and flexibility are key to a successful business.
In order to blunt the impact of "surprises," Mary Beth Brinkerhoff travels with a rolling three-tiered toolbox full of all of the items she is legally allowed to carry with her from place to place: disposable baking pans, plastic wrap, foil, parchment paper, a caddy full of dry spices, and a small bag full of first-aid supplies for the inevitable knicks and burns that any serious cook is going to rack up. At the other end of the spectrum, others arrive with only their shopping bags and a prep list for the day. When things are really unworkable, some personal chefs simply buy their clients a knife, a decent pot or two, and whatever else might be missing and pass these items along as gifts. Such gestures not only make the lives of the personal chefs themselves easier, they also build trust and affection between them and their clients.
Trust is at the core of what personal chefs do: they have remarkable access to the lives of their clients, and their clients are relying on them to feed their families. As Mary Lynn Vickers notes, "You can tell a lot about people by looking in the fridge," and knowing what to do with that insight is the key to keeping clients happy.
Unlike restaurants, which offer a fixed menu to a client base that can come or go as it pleases, personal chefs tailor their menus to each client's particular wants and needs, adapting to changing tastes and circumstances over time. Many, like Patti Battista keep interest up by guaranteeing variety: she has a large enough repertoire that, unless clients request a specific dish, they won't see the same thing on the menu for at least four months. Others cook cherished family recipes for their clients, bringing comfort and familiarity to the experience. For clients on diets, Battista has been known to pack special lunches to help them stick to it. Almost everyone leaves a batch of cookies, fresh-baked goods, or a dessert behind from time to time. If a client has a dog, Battista will even whip up a batch of biscuits for the family pooch. A personal chef does everything she can to make herself essential to her clients.
"My job," Brinkerhoff observed, "is to do my very best to get your attention, to get you loving food, and keep you coming back for more." Personal chefs develop an intimate and supportive relationship with their clients. They conduct in-depth interviews - a sort of Match.com of food - and follow up early and often. They check in over the course of the week to see if their clients are happy with the meals they found in their refrigerators and freezers, and communicate in advance of cook days to plan menus.
Vickers particularly notes that as the relationship between personal chef and client develops, that clients will tend to become more adventurous and more trusting of her judgment. Brinkerhoff anticipates this change, revisiting the food preference questionnaire with her clients at least once a year to ensure that she is still cooking to their evolving tastes. Battista, once she has a good relationship with a client (and sometimes at the client's request), will push the envelope a bit, adding a new fish or a new flavor combination to the mix.
Constant feedback is essential because, as Battista puts it, "Food feeds the soul. If you can make [clients] happy through food, you have a client for life... But it only takes one meal to blow your relationship."
When the relationship works it can last for a surprisingly long time. Vickers says that she has clients for whom she had been cooking for as long as three years. Brinkerhoff has had similar experiences. Inevitably, though, circumstances for clients change and the relationship ends, but some of Vickers's clients still call her to do dinner parties or special occasions for them, and one-off gift certificate gigs can, and often do, lead to steady clients.
Several of the personal chefs I spoke to describe the food they leave for their clients as approachable, simple, or rustic. But what it is is home cooking on a very high level. Largely without fancy sauces that will not freeze or reheat well, these meals do not suffer from the rigors of freezing, thawing, and reheating ("finishing" in personal chef-speak). They are dishes that families might make for themselves if they had the time in their busy days to shop and cook. Packed with fresh ingredients, this is nutritious food that more or less magically appears in the fridge each week at an average cost of $250 plus the cost of groceries - about $12.50 per serving.
The goal, Battista says is to "get clients eating within one half-hour" of sliding the dish into the oven. Even more important, it's a way to "sneak nutrition in through the backdoor" for the kids, educate their palates away from "impulse foods" and chicken fingers, and "bring the family back to the table for an organized meal."
Brinkerhoff is only halfway through her cooking day when we part. In a bit under two hours, she has made two meals - pan-seared chicken breasts with braised leeks and a bulgar and vermicelli pilaf, a "mojito"-marinated pork loin with a roasted pineapple salsa - and she's about to transition to a third dish, mahi-mahi fillets en papillote (she has just pulled a roll of parchment paper from her toolbox). The kitchen is hot and the smells are intoxicating. She still has two dishes, plus clean-up ahead of her before she heads home to cook dinner for her own family of five. I pocket her card, tuck her brochure into my bulging notebook, and hurry home, wondering what I have in the house, and thinking how nice it must be to come home to a refrigerator full of dinner.
For more information on local personal chefs, visit the United States Personal Chef Association at hireachef.com.