Private chef Brian Arruda, who spent years cooking at Daniel Boulud’s restaurants, founded Executive Chefs at Home, a private chef placement agency. (Photo by Sarah B. Swan.)

E arlier this year, I was talking with a Manhattan chef who said the cooks who used to last a year or two before washing out of New York restaurants now only stick around for a few months. A former cook shared that when his friend trailed at one of New York’s hottest restaurants, none of the line cooks had been there longer than six months. Complaints about how hard it is to find cooks are nothing new—working on the line is demanding, the pay isn’t great, that kitchen might be bad. But, depending on who you ask, young cooks are either less beholden to the idea of paying their dues, or don’t really have to put their time in anymore. A just-long-enough stint at a hot restaurant on the resume can be a path to sidestep the old way of doing things. Say, by becoming a private chef. Annika Altura, a 20-something sous chef at Oriana, told me she’d met a peer in her early 20s who’d recently been promoted to sous chef at a well-reviewed, high-end restaurant in Manhattan. “She said, ‘Yeah, I’m probably going to do this for another year,’” Altura recalls. “‘Then I’m going to go into private and supper clubs because I don’t want to be living with roommates anymore.’”

Josh Cohen, who runs a pop-up called Trakt and has cooked for some masters of the universe, says that his industry has exploded since 2021. He now hears about young cooks working only six months at one-Michelin-star restaurants just to become private chefs. “It used to be something you would fall into,” says Cohen, who never planned on doing this. For millennials and gen Xers who became chefs to pursue their passion, going private was considered selling out. “The fact that a kid coming out of culinary school wants to be a private chef is completely new.”

Others, working both in restaurants and as private chefs, told me they’re seeing this, too. Jonathan Chesler, who worked for Thomas Keller and opened the second iteration of Torrisi as a sous, says he gets messages “all the time” from young cooks wanting to become private chefs. “Even people wanting to go to culinary school just to become a private chef,” he adds. He has a job with a long-term client, which involves some travel, and runs his own company, Chesler Hospitality, which offers services including events and private chef placements.

For most of the private chefs I spoke with, their new careers were a payoff after years of working in intense and exacting environments for not a lot of money. At the most competitive restaurants, line cooks start at minimum wage or a few dollars more, then can make sort-of-enough as a sous chef (often $60,000 to $75,000). It’s obviously seductive to go from that to, for the highest-earning and most experienced private chefs, making the same kind of money as an early-career associate at a white-shoe law firm. Some enthusiastic converts told me they feel pangs for the old lifestyle—the intensity of chasing awards, pushing yourself day in and day out—but their income can double overnight, and their hours can get cut in half. I’ve heard about one private chef in New York who’s paid six figures by a Gulf prince who’s in town for only a month or two a year. There are chefs who reportedly get close to $300,000 for a three-day work week. A guy we’ll call Chef Hamptons Highroller said he took a three-month, guaranteed contract out East, during which he worked a grand total of one day for the client. Instead, he took on a lot of freelance work, dinner parties, and other one-night obligations. “The Hamptons is ‘money season,’” Chef Hamptons Highroller says.

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