Got the Bread? Hire a Home Chef

Don’t know your arugula from your elbow, or simply too tired to cook? Have you overdosed on microwave dinners? Is nightly takeout cuisine getting to be too much?

Imagine coming home from a draining day at work to find your table set with a meal prepared by your own professional chef--someone who spends his or her days trying to please your particular palate and can prepare anything from a six-course Russian feast to a simple Thai salad.

$750 a Week

A chef of one’s own isn’t for everyone--the going rate is around $750 a week--but the Epicurean Connection Agency is here for those who can afford it. Like other domestic agencies, the Epicurean Connection provides household help, but it’s unique in Los Angeles: a small, specialized service that does nothing but match chefs with prospective employers.

“Our clients are used to going out to the best restaurants, and they want the same kind of food in their homes,” says Susan Rabb, who co-founded the placement service in March with partner Shelley Janson. Since then, they’ve specialized in placing highly trained chefs in the homes of entertainment industry professionals, old-money families and what they call “the new young rich.”

Janson, 35, is the founder of the Epicurean Cooking School in West Hollywood, a training school for professional chefs. The Epicurean Connection, a licensed and bonded domestic employment agency, is an outgrowth of the school.

The partners met at the Epicurean Cooking School when Rabb signed up for classes. Originally from New York, she had worked in food marketing for General Foods and Campbell’s Soups, and was trying to improve her personal cooking skills.

Janson, meanwhile, was ready to start a new business, and she had already had people calling the school, looking for recommendations for trained chefs.

“I was staffing local restaurants with sous chefs and pantry people as a sideline, for free,” says Janson. “Then somebody, once, called me from her home and said, ‘I need someone, can you help me?’ ”

That caller was one of L.A.’s more prominent socialites, and the call gave Janson the idea that they could make money with a domestic agency specializing in nothing but professional chefs for the home.

According to the women, their clients aren’t satisfied with a combination maid-housekeeper-cook. “It used to be the greatest thing in the world to have somebody who was a housekeeper and cooked your meals and did five different things,” says Janson. “Not any more. People are attuned to what’s good. Taste levels have changed dramatically. People don’t just go into a restaurant today and spend $100 and think it’s great.”

All agency costs are paid by the client; the standard is a flat fee equivalent to one month’s salary for the chef. For qualified chefs who pass the Epicurean Connection’s screening process, it costs nothing to list with the agency.

Most of the chefs on their roster, according to Janson, are “in their 30s, and pretty well-rounded. They know about ethnic foods, they know about classic French, they know about everything. But the forte for most people today is California cooking.”

Chefs are also expected to have experience with a recognized school, like the Culinary Academy of America, or what Rabb calls “superlative experience” in private homes or restaurants. They also must agree to sign a statement of confidentiality, if hired, to protect the client’s privacy.

The matching process begins with Rabb, who conducts an initial interview with applicant chefs, including a detailed personality profile, references, curriculum vitae, employment history, culinary specialties, and expected salary. The chef is also asked to prepare several sample menus.

All information on clients, however, is taken over the telephone. If Rabb and Janson think they may have found a good match, they send the chef for an interview with the client or the client’s assistant, and encourage the client to try them out for a few days.

After a successful match, the Epicurean Connection works as the chef’s agent, settling salary demands, time off and the number of hours to be worked each week. If the match ultimately doesn’t work, clients have a no-questions-asked return guarantee on their chef, and they have the option to go back to the Epicurean Connection within 60 days to try again.

Salary is based on a chef’s experience, and generally runs between $100 and $175 per day. All food costs are paid by the client, and they can be sizable. Rabb says that one chef told her that the food costs in the household he served, consisting of one couple and their son, ranged from $3,000 to $5,000 per month.

Word of Mouth

The fledgling service began operations with no publicity, and only one small advertisement in the magazine Beverly Hills 213. Mostly by word of mouth, the Epicurean Connection has been growing slowly and steadily over the last five months. Janson and Rabb now have 30 to 40 chefs on file at any particular time, and they field three or four calls a week from potential employers. The agency has already provided chefs for such clients as Aaron and Candy Spelling, Jerry Moss of A&M; Records, and producer Keith Addis.

For clients with more money than time, one of the main advantages of employing a trained chef is the lack of supervision needed.

“I wanted someone who could take full charge, with very little direction,” says Kathleen Spiegelman, who came to the Epicurean Connection and has since recommended the agency to her friends. She and her husband prefer to entertain friends at home rather than in restaurants, and they hired a chef to come in five days a week.

“We wanted someone to cook California cuisine--fish, chicken, salads, etc.,” says Spiegelman. “And it’s great just to tell a chef that six people are coming to dinner, that one of them is a vegetarian, one of them doesn’t like this or that, and just leave it in their hands.”

Chefs’ specific duties vary as to the needs of the household and the temperament of the chef. In some households, the chef will be the only member of the kitchen staff; in others, he or she will be part of a unit. Domestic chores such as cleaning up the dishes are negotiable, but chefs are generally expected to shop for the food they prepare.

“Most of these people have accounts at the Irvine Ranch Market, at Jurgensen’s, at Phil’s Fish market, and elsewhere, and they expect the chef to get the best quality (of food),” says Rabb.

“I had one chef who was expected to go out every week to (Beverly Hills delicatessen) Nate ‘n Al’s,” says Janson, “just to get pounds of everything, fresh meats and rye bread and all of that. And they would fill the refrigerator with all that stuff. And at the end of the week, he would just throw them out untouched, but the woman of the house just wanted them in there. And he was spending hundreds of dollars every week.”

Most of the chefs listed with the Epicurean Connection are looking for full-time work, like Genee Wilner. She has worked on film sets, cooking for stars like Jane Fonda, and has cooked at home for Charles Bronson, Cher, Bob Dylan and Norton Simon.

Wilner listed with the agency, and soon found herself working in a private home four days a week. She is enthusiastic about the Epicurean Connection, though she’s left that particular job and is still looking for another full-time position.

Other chefs, like Brigitte Wiltzer, prefer that the Connection send them out on one-time jobs and catering for special parties.

“I’m not really interested in a full-time position in a private home,” says Wiltzer, who owns her own catering service, Brigitte’s Kitchen. She is on the agency’s roster of chefs for special occasion catering. Though the Epicurean Connection has only provided her with two jobs, she considers both Janson and Rabb to be friends and speaks of the “high quality” of employers that they have provided for her.

Janson and Rabb have no plans to diversify the Epicurean Connection into other areas. Placing chefs with restaurants might seem to be a logical offshoot, but, according to Janson, the few restaurants that have contacted them about placing a chef tend to back away when fees are discussed. “Restaurants will never be part of our area. No matter how successful they are, they never have any money,” she says. “Ninety-nine percent of them are just sneaking by.”

These days, someone like Wolfgang Puck is almost as famous as some of the people for whom he cooks. Status can be very important in L.A., and keeping up with the Joneses can take a lot of money, especially when the Joneses have a personal chef. How much of the business at Epicurean Connection is really about hiring a status symbol rather than an employee?

“I really don’t think it’s much,” says Janson. “We did have one lady, but that was about all. I find that it’s truly a question of need.

“Our clients fall into three categories: people who already have a household staff and want to augment it, people who are just too busy, and some who are maybe married to a woman who doesn’t know that she has to do this as part of her life.”