| |
 |
Personal chefs are no longer just for the rich
|
From USA Today Feb 9-11
A power shift is astir in America's kitchens, and it has nothing to do with those little buttons on your blender.
In the not-too-distant future, the country's most sought-after chefs may no longer be the celebs overseeing trendy urban restaurants and starring in TV cooking shows. Takeout food from restaurants and grocery stores may no longer be the automatic in-a-pinch choices for the harried, hungry masses. There may not even be a pinch.
The emerging pacesetters are chefs who cook in customers' homes and empower them to specify the cuisine, menus, calorie content, spicing levels and dinner hour. These pros more closely resemble your grandmother than Escoffier: They also do your shopping, wash the dishes, even take out the garbage.
They're graduating from cooking schools by the hundreds, and they are beginning to reshape the chef-diner relationship.
“This is the kitchen equivalent of day care,”says Clark Wolf, a New York-based food and restaurant consultant. “Just as we have accepted other people taking care of our kids with our instructions, we have accepted other people cooking for us with our instructions.”
What people want the most isn't found in any restaurant or grocery store. “What I'm selling people is time, not so much food, or I'm selling them health,” says Jan Sims, who runs the 7-month-old personal chef service And What's for Dinner in Topeka, Kan. The mouth-filling slogan for her business: “Meals Like Mom Made, Made in Your Place to Your Taste.”
When in-home chef services came to national attention in the mid-1990s, the prime customer base was affluent couples, usually with families. But the number of personal chefs has mushroomed since then, and today they're increasingly filtering into mainstream markets such as Sunbelt retirement communities and middle-class homes in the heartland.
The United States Professional Chef Association, one of the industry's largest training and certifying organizations, places the number of full-time in-home chefs at 6,000, and the customers using them at 100,000 or more.
Five years ago, “there were maybe just a few hundred personal chefs,” says the association's president, David MacKay. “Today they're in every state and in every city above 50,000 (population).”
|
|
|
|
