Culinary Staff
Private culinary staff cook for families in their homes. They plan menus, shop for ingredients, prepare meals, and manage the kitchen in someone’s home.
Some families need a chef for daily meals. Others need one for events and entertaining. Some want Michelin-level cooking. Others want healthy, simple food done well. The role changes depending on the household.
Relationships are what make these roles work. A private chef learns the family’s tastes, and routines. They cook for the same people every day, which is quite a personal thing.
If you are looking to hire culinary staff for your home, we can help. If you are a chef looking for a private role, you can browse the positions we recruit for below.
How to Hire the Right Culinary Staff
The biggest decision is working out what you actually need. That sounds obvious, but we see clients get this wrong more than anything else.
Start with the basics. How many people are you feeding and how often?
Do you need someone every day, or just for events? Is cooking the only role, or do you also need help with housekeeping?
If you want daily meals for a family and occasional dinner parties, then you need to hire a private chef.
If you want someone who can cook simple, good food but also keep the home clean, a housekeeper/cook or a family cook is a better fit, and usually more affordable.
Be clear about diets and preferences around that from the beginning.
Honestly, from our experience, telling us as early as you can is so much better, it saves weeks of searching.
We always recommend a trial. A chef might have a perfect CV, but food is personal, you need to taste their cooking before hiring them.
Most chefs will do a paid trial dinner or a two or three day trial to see if it is the right match.
For bigger homes or if you entertain more, you might need a chef who can talk to guests, present dishes, and bring some entertainment and flair.
That is a different skill set from someone who cooks quietly in the background. Knowing which you want helps us find the right person.
Roles we place
Our culinary recruitment services cover all the roles you might expect. The main roles we place are below.
Plans menus, shops, and prepares daily meals for the family. Often handles events and entertaining too.
Cooks good food for families who want a regular chef to prepare meals for them on a regular basis.
Why work with Morgan & Mallet
Private household recruitment is all we do.
200,000 + candidates in our database. Only one in four applicants makes it into our database. We are extremely careful who we add to our network.
We test skills, not just CVs. During our 90-minute interviews, we ask chefs about specific techniques, cuisines, and dietary knowledge. We check where candidates were trained, what level they worked at, and whether they can adapt to private household cooking.
Matching matters more than credentials. The hardest part of placing a private chef is not finding talent, it is finding the right match between chef and home. A chef’s style needs to fit the family’s tastes. We check the candidates personality, adaptability, and the ability to work in someone’s home, not just their ability to cook well.
96% placement success rate. In New York, 91% of our chef placements complete full annual contracts. We achieve this by being honest with both sides, if a salary is below market or expectations are unrealistic, we will tell you.
What you should know about these roles
Private Chef
Demand is growing for private chefs. More families want restaurant-quality food at home, and more business entertaining is happening in private homes rather than restaurants.
Most clients want two things from one chef, healthy daily meals during the week and fine dining cooking when guests come.
Finding someone who does both well is the hard part.
The best candidates have worked in top restaurants and then moved into private households.
French, Italian, and British chefs are most common. Japanese food is asked for quite often, especially in Dubai.
US salaries: $180,000–$300,000.
Housekeeper/Cook
A combined role for households that need cooking and cleaning but not two separate people. The usual split is about 60% housekeeping, 40% cooking.
The cooking is good home food, not fine dining.
The most common problem is expectations. Some clients want restaurant-quality meals and five-star housekeeping from the same person.
That's two full-time jobs. If cooking is the main priority, hiring a chef separately is the best option in our experience.
Female Private Chef
Some clients specifically ask for a female chef. For different reasons, it can be religious, sometimes the client is a woman living alone who feels more comfortable with a female in the home.
The role itself is no different. The same skills, the same expectations, the same salary range.
There is a smaller pool of these chefs so sometimes might take a little longer to find the right match.
Looking for a
culinary role?
If you are a chef or culinary professional looking for private work, we would like to hear from you.
View our live roles below to see if we have anything available that fits your skills and experience.