How to interview a private chef

Almost every family interviewing a private chef makes the same mistake. They schedule a tasting, the candidate produces a stunning dinner — something with a beautiful sear and a sauce that took years to learn — and the decision is made by dessert.

Six months later the same family calls us, puzzled. The chef is talented, no question. But the kids won't eat, the grocery spend is a mystery, the kitchen is tense, and everyone is tired of being impressed on a Tuesday.

The tasting was theater. It answered a question nobody was asking. Of course the chef can cook — most candidates at this level trained in serious kitchens and can produce a flawless dinner on command. What you cannot see on a plate is judgment, and judgment is what the job runs on. That, you have to interview for.

The job you're actually hiring for

A private chef is not a restaurant chef relocated to your kitchen. It is a different profession that happens to share knife skills. The restaurant chef performs for strangers who chose to be there, once. Your chef cooks for the same five people hundreds of times a year — including a seven-year-old, a training regimen, a grandmother's visit, and a Tuesday when everyone is tired and nobody wants anything ambitious.

The failure mode is nearly always the same: a brilliant cook who cannot make the shift from performance to service. So the interview's real subject is that shift. (If what you actually need is several dinners a week rather than a full food program, you may be describing a personal chef — a different search, and an honest interview will surface that too.)

The questions that reveal judgment

Skip the tour of their repertoire. Ask questions that have no rehearsed answer.

"Walk me through a week of family dinners for us." Give them your real household — ages, allergies, preferences, schedules — and let them think out loud. You are listening for questions back. A chef who starts naming dishes is performing. A chef who asks what time the kids eat, who is home Thursdays, and what the family actually loved last month is already doing the job.

"Tell me about a dish a family asked for again and again. How did you keep it interesting — for you?" Repetition is the core of private work. Some chefs find quiet craft in making the same roast chicken perfect two hundred times. Others slowly resent it, and the resentment reaches the plate. This question sorts them.

"Describe a meal that failed. What happened afterward?" Everyone has one. You are not judging the failure; you are judging the debrief. Did they ask the principal what went wrong, or decide the family simply lacked taste? A chef who cannot hear "the kids hated it" without wounding is a chef you will stop giving feedback to — and then you will have a beautiful, slowly worsening food program.

"How do you run provisioning? Walk me through your last food budget." This is where professionals separate from talented amateurs. A serious private chef can talk fluently about sourcing, seasonal cost swings, inventory, waste, and what a family of your size typically spends. Vagueness here predicts the mystery grocery bills that end these arrangements.

"Who else works in the house, and how do you fit in?" Chefs share territory — with housekeepers who clean the kitchen, an estate manager who holds the budget, a nanny feeding children at five. Listen for how they talk about former colleagues. Kitchen temperament is household temperament.

Ask about travel and flexibility plainly. If the family summers in the Hamptons or decamps to Palm Beach for the season, say so now. Cooking from an unfamiliar kitchen with two hours' notice is part of some roles and absent from others; mismatched expectations here account for a striking share of first-year departures.

And throughout, listen for discretion. A candidate who tells you delicious stories about a former principal's dinner guests will someday tell delicious stories about yours.

What a trial week should actually test

Then, yes — cooking. But structured like the job, not like an audition. A paid trial week, in your kitchen, living your actual rhythm. Design it deliberately:

• Weeknights first. School-night dinner, real constraints, children's verdicts included. This is eighty percent of the job; weight it that way.
• One repeat. Ask for the same dish twice in the week. You learn whether consistency is a value or an insult.
• One curveball. Change dinner time by two hours, add two guests at four o'clock, or have someone's plans collapse. Watch the recovery, not the menu.
• One layered day. Kids' early dinner plus a small dinner for guests the same evening. Sequencing under pressure is the craft.
• The budget, reconciled. Give a provisioning budget at the start; sit down over receipts at the end. This conversation — comfortable or evasive — tells you more than any tasting.
• The kitchen at week's end. Walk in Saturday morning. The state of the walk-in, the labeling, the cleanliness of the machine itself is the chef's signature.

If a tasting still matters to you, fold it in as the guest dinner — constrained by budget, brief, and your family's requirements. Judged that way, it becomes real information instead of theater.

Decide like an advisor

After the trial, ignore the single best dish of the week. Ask instead: did the food get more ours as the week went on? Did the chef adjust from Monday's feedback by Wednesday, unprompted? Does the kitchen feel calmer with them in it, or charged?

A chef who listens will be cooking your family's favorite meals in year three. A chef who performs will be gone by the first anniversary, and you will both be relieved.

When you are ready to run this search properly — scoped, vetted, trialed — start the conversation here. We have been matching chefs and families since 2002, and the good ones are worth the process.