Food secrets of the super-rich, according to their private chefs

Maddy DeVita has her dream job. The 25-year-old works as a private chef for a wealthy American family in their glistening holiday mansion in the Hamptons complete with a gorgeous kitchen — or should I say, kitchens. The house has three, including seven fridges and freezers, an outdoor gas-burning grill worth £13,000 and a marble-topped “show” kitchen. “I prefer working in the galley. It’s not as disruptive,” she tells me.
DeVita is with the family for the summer, travelling from Brooklyn, where she lives, on Wednesday evening and staying until Sunday. When there she is the family’s domestic goddess, in charge of prepping and cooking all meals and snacks for the parents, kids, staff and many friends they host for dinner parties on the terrace overlooking the house’s perfectly mown lawns. Except you’d already know that if you followed DeVita’s TikTok page, @handmethefork, where she shares videos with her 377,000 followers of herself making caviar blinis, buying white truffle and kneading sourdough.
This is how the other half eat. And, newsflash: they don’t do the cooking. Blitzing up their green juices, planning their meals, whipping up lavish feasts for their friends, and landscaping their fridges (yes, really; more on that later) is a team of full-time private chefs. It is a world full of eye-watering shopping lists, jaw-dropping kitchens, high-profile clients and commutes to second homes on private jets.
Watching the videos — mouths open, stomachs rumbling — are millions of fascinated followers, analysing the contents of pantries, zooming in on screenshots and cross-referencing TikTok videos with magazine photoshoots to try to work out who the clients (whose identities are discreetly hidden) are. When Brooke Baevsky, aka @chefbae, uploaded a video of herself catering a kids’ party in LA with a — gulp — $500,000 budget, her 378,000 followers immediately started guessing who the child was. “I want to say Kourtney Kardashian’s,” one commented. “I think it’s Elon Musk’s child,” another said. Arguably the most famous private chef on TikTok is Rob Li (@broccoliraab (1.1 million followers), who films what he makes for his “billionaire client living in the Hamptons” (the phrase many of his videos start with) as his soothing, surfer dude-esque voice narrates. Even the most mundane of kitchen chores are entertaining when you’re doing them in a luxury kitchen.
This time last year, the British chef Isabella Samengo-Turner, 29, was working full-time for an American family of six, who split their time between their LA mansion, their west London townhouse and their Montana ranch. Her day began at about 8am when she served breakfast — juices, chia pots, fruit bowls — and finished between 9pm and 10pm, once she’d made dinner and cleaned up. Samengo-Turner spent most of her time spinning plates: often everyone ate different meals; some days she would cook six separate dinners. The youngest toddler loved sushi and his favourite food was scallops. Meanwhile, the parents enjoyed lobster and swordfish.
She now works for a British couple with grown-up kids who split their time between London and the Bahamas, sharing updates on Instagram and TikTok (@foodby_isabella). It’s her dream job, she says. Like all the chefs I speak to, she seeks her clients’ permission to post beforehand and is careful with what she shares. As well as cooking meals and catering for dinner parties, her jobs range from “pantry management” to making sure snacks are stocked and keeping fruit bowls topped up with the freshest produce. It won’t shock you to learn that she doesn’t do the food shop at Sainsbury’s. Instead it’s farmers’ markets and luxe greengrocers.
In New York, the go-to food store for the super-rich, according to the private chefs I speak to, is Citarella, a fresh food and fish market with sites in the city’s most affluent neighbourhoods. In London, it’s the Notting Hill Fish + Meat Shop, the glitzy establishment where David Beckham and Hugh Jackman have been spotted. “I call that place ‘the staffroom’. You go in and see all the other private chefs,” Samengo-Turner says. In LA, it’s a shop founded by a Japanese couple called Erewhon, with a cult following on TikTok made up of people mostly gobsmacked by the prices. “It’s like Planet Organic and Whole Foods on steroids. You can’t have any budget in mind because it’ll blow it. Everything is made in the store — the pesto, peanut butter, hummus and pasta,” she continues. “I once did a food shop for a client for two days’ meals and it was $875.”
Who is setting the budget and deciding where chefs can shop? “It’s a conversation that you will have when you start working together, but it’s the expectation that you go there. They want the best and that’s where they would go anyway.”
Often clients give their private chefs a credit card or they have an account set up at the store that bills are charged straight to. Other shops will have a concierge service where you can WhatsApp them with your shopping list and they’ll deliver it to your door. “I had one client who — once I’d done the food shop — wanted their fridge landscaped, so I did various tiered cake stands of fruit and snacks,” Samengo-Turner says.
You may have ogled your friend’s Aga but private chefs work with a whole new level of kitchen kit. The gadgets in these homes make the Thermomix you’ve lusted after seem as sophisticated as a Breville toastie maker. The supersize double-door fridges in these kitchens are usually from the luxury brand Sub Zero and cost from about £8,000. As for range cookers, “everyone has a six-ring Lacanche oven” — costing from about £3,000. “They are stunning to use,” she says.
But while the equipment may be gorgeous, that doesn’t mean the job is free of kitchen nightmares and outrageous demands. One chef I speak to — who asks to remain anonymous — tells me her colleague was once flown by a client (a tech millionaire living in London) to her favourite restaurant in Italy for two weeks to learn how to cook her favourite dish. Another chef tells me he refused to take a job when he saw the prospective client shout at other members of staff.
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Most of the chef Michael Gordon’s clients live in either in Notting Hill or Primrose Hill. Sometimes he’s booked for a long weekend in the Cotswolds. His roster of regulars includes a businessman who has sold his beauty empire, a high-profile Indian politician and a video games exec. His roles range from meal prep to dinner parties. He loves his job for the balance, working three days a week. What do his chef friends, working late nights and long weeks, think? “There is some snobbery that it’s not real cheffing,” he says. “I think they’re jealous that I earn more and work less, but not everyone is suited to it. You need to be a people person.”
How do you avoid things reaching boiling point when you’re working for clients with such high standards? “It’s all about setting boundaries and building relationships. You have to get along. You are there for their highs and lows, and intimate family moments,” he says. “And remember, they’re not eating caviar every night. Quite often it’s just normal food like cheese toasties.”