A personal chef cooks for a private family in their home. But cooking is only part of the role. Most of the week is menu planning, market sourcing, and adapting to the family’s schedule and dietary preferences. A personal chef runs the kitchen on their own in most households.
Laurine Mallet, co-founder of Morgan & Mallet, trained as a chef before starting the agency. Her time in kitchens still shapes how the team writes personal chef briefs.
This page gives you a full example job description to use as a template when hiring someone for the role. To find out more, see our private chef hiring guide. It covers what private chefs do every day, salaries by country, the different types of chef placements (family chef, executive chef, traveling chef, plant-based), and how to hire one.
Example of a personal chef job description
Here’s an example brief for a full-time, live-out personal chef for a family in New York City. The example is based on a real Morgan & Mallet placement. It’s a typical US household chef hire: weekday meals for the family, some entertaining, and a chef who’s free to plan the menus within the family’s dietary preferences.
About the family
A high-net-worth family is hiring a personal chef for their three-person household in central Manhattan. Both parents work, and there’s one teenager at home. The family eats together most weeknights, hosts dinners three or four times a month, and travels to a country home upstate on weekends.
The family eats Mediterranean-leaning, with fish four times a week, no red meat, and one full vegetarian day. There are no allergies, but they want lighter weekday meals and more ambitious cooking when guests are over.
The role is full-time, live-out, Monday through Friday with occasional weekend cover for entertaining and family travel.
Responsibilities
In the kitchen
- Cook breakfast (when requested), lunch, and dinner for the family on weekdays
- Plate and serve meals when the family eats at home
- Cook for dinner parties of up to ten guests, working with the family on the menu before each event
- Maintain a clean, well-organized kitchen and proper food storage
- Manage equipment care, knife sharpening, and small appliance upkeep
Sourcing and menus
- Build a weekly menu around the family’s stated preferences (Mediterranean, fish-led, no red meat, one vegetarian day)
- Adjust menus week to week based on what’s seasonal and what’s at the markets
- Source from local butchers, fishmongers, farmers’ markets, and specialty suppliers
- Manage the kitchen budget and pass weekly receipts and notes to the family office
Working with the family
- Take feedback in stride: what the family liked, what they didn’t, what they want more of
- Adapt menus when the household’s needs change (a guest with an allergy, a teenager with new preferences, a working week that runs late)
- Keep the kitchen calm and out of the way of family life, especially during entertaining
- Coordinate with any other household staff (housekeeper, nanny) on shared spaces and timing
Requirements
Essential
- Minimum 5 years in professional kitchens, with at least 2 years in a private household, fine-dining restaurant, or high-end hospitality role
- Verifiable references from previous private families or executive chefs
- Confident across at least two cuisines, and able to take a brief and run with it (not just cook set recipes)
- ServSafe certification (US) or equivalent food safety credential
- Comfortable doing the shopping, sourcing, and admin alongside the cooking
Preferred
- Culinary school qualification (CIA, ICE, Le Cordon Bleu, CAP, or equivalent)
- Time at a Michelin-starred restaurant
- Experience cooking for guests with specific dietary needs (keto, gluten-free, vegan, allergies)
- A second language
Personal qualities
- Diplomatic and even-tempered. The strongest private chefs come from restaurant kitchens but leave the kitchen hierarchy behind when they walk through the family’s door
- Able to take feedback directly from the principals without taking it personally
- Discreet about everything seen and overheard inside the home
- Organized enough to run a one-person kitchen across menu planning, shopping, cooking, and cleanup with no support staff
Work conditions
- Full-time, live-out
- Monday through Friday, typically 9am to 8pm with breaks during the day
- Occasional weekend cover for events and family travel
- Travel pay when accompanying the family to the country home or overseas
- Health insurance, paid vacation, and an annual food and equipment budget for personal development
- Salary based on experience
Common variations on this brief
The example above is a typical single-chef US household. But there could be some variations on this:
- Multi-kitchen estates. In our largest placements, a chef works inside a household with multiple kitchens and a full kitchen team. We’ve placed chefs in homes with four separate kitchens, including one set up just for Italian cooking and another for large events. These briefs need a candidate with executive-chef-level experience, not just cooking ability.
- Michelin-trained private chef. Increasingly common at the top of the market. Families want restaurant-level food at home, and a chef with one or two years in a Michelin kitchen is what some briefs name specifically. There aren’t many of these chefs around, and they expect top-end salaries.
The most important thing the brief needs to make clear is whether the chef is cooking only or also running suppliers and a small team. The two roles take different candidates, and chefs sort themselves into one or the other when they apply.
Using this job description
If you’re using this to help you hire for the role, change the responsibilities and requirements sections to match what it is exactly you are looking for. Things that change the most would be how often the family entertains, the dietary restrictions in the household, whether the chef will travel between properties, and whether there’s any kitchen support.
By far the most useful thing you can do at the brief stage is be specific about how the family gives feedback to the chef. Some chefs come from kitchens where critical feedback was the norm. Others have been at restaurants where the chef was unquestioned. A private home is neither, and how a chef handles feedback is one of the strongest signs of whether they’ll stay.
Morgan & Mallet places personal chefs across New York, Los Angeles, Miami, the rest of the US, London, Paris, Geneva, and Dubai. If you’d like us to refine a job description for your family, or help you hire, get in touch with one of our offices or call us on +1 (646)965-2308.
Looking for a position as a personal chef? View our current vacancies on the Morgan & Mallet job board.
This job description was reviewed by Laurine Mallet, co-founder of Morgan & Mallet, who among other roles trained as a chef before founding the agency.