The House Special

The evening meal had become a necessary evil for Stephen and Chris Javier. At the end of their long and busy days, eating well was the first thing they wanted to do. Cooking was, well, the last thing.

“It’s not that we wouldn’t like to be handier and more creative in the kitchen,” said Chris, 46, a preschool special education teacher. “But the fact is, we’re not. Whether because we don’t have the time or because we just don’t enjoy it, we always found a reason not to cook.”

Instead, the Javiers slipped into restaurants, retrieved takeout, cruised drive-throughs or microwaved quick fixes. But restaurant dining further lengthened their days, takeout expeditions were such productions, fast food often seemed like neither, and microwaved cuisine came off like computer-era TV dinners.

“We used to joke around, saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we had someone to cook for us?’ ” recalled Stephen, 51, a retired machinist. “We were only kidding, though. We never thought we could afford it.”

But what used to be an upper-crust luxury has evolved into the latest middle-class coping mechanism. Tonight, in their Fountain Valley home, Stephen and Chris Javier will eat a meal conceived, purchased and prepared by their personal chef.

Maybe they will dine on beef with wild mushroom sauce and egg noodles. Perhaps they will select turkey-and-vegetable shepherd’s pie and mashed potatoes. They could choose chicken Milano with a citrus sauce and a blend of white, brown and wild rice. Or Mediterranean penne pasta with garlic bread. Or barbecued chicken with green beans on the side and blueberry muffins for dessert.

These are among 10 dinners-for-two that the Javiers’ personal chef, Allison Longaker, cooked in their kitchen and stored in their freezer during the latest of her monthly visits. Longaker also left simple instructions for heating the meals, along with next month’s menu for their approval or amendment.

“It’s still kind of hard to believe,” admitted Chris, giggling as she savored her gastronomic options for the evening. “But we’ve been doing this for about a year now, and we’re finding that it suits our style of living.”

The arrangement is typical of a trend that is burgeoning in the 1990s as the time-squeezed, two-income household attempts to reclaim some of of the comforts and the quality of the home-cooked meal--even if it means paying somebody else to come in and do the home cooking.

“Eating their favorite foods in their homes is part of why people wanted homes in the first place,” said Longaker, who cooks in a number of Orange County households. “I come across some big, beautiful kitchens that have barely been used. I see lots of refrigerators empty except for old ice cubes or maybe a Popsicle or the salad dressing rack. If not for pizza delivery and fast food, some of these people would never eat.”

Longaker customizes her menus by referring to the personal interview, written questionnaire and open file she keeps on each client--information about everything from fat content to affinity for onions. She brings her own pots and pans and leaves the kitchen in the same condition she found it--except for the full freezer. Before she arrives, she goes grocery shopping on behalf of the client.

Some people want the variety of orange-basil marinated swordfish with garlic-roasted potatoes on one day, chicken-shrimp-and-sausage paella the next day, and fennel pork roast with red chile-seared broccoli the day after that. Others are comfortable with a weekly routine.

“I’m as detailed and involved as my clients want me to be,” Longaker said. “Some barely care. They’re like, ‘OK, cool, we have food.’ But others really participate. They leave me notes, magazine clippings, entire cookbooks. They call me with ideas and suggestions. They love it.”

The U.S. Personal Chef Assn., a training and marketing organization based in Corrales, N.M., has grown from five members in three states in 1992 to more than 900 members in 49 states and Canada.

“Orange County is a prime area for this kind of service,” said David MacKay, executive director. “There are lots of working couples who spend lots of time commuting. They don’t want to use two or more hours preparing and cleaning up around a 20-minute dinner. Keeping that time available for other things is worth money to them.”

Quality of life is an attractive factor for the personal chefs too.

Nadine and Tom Manning of Newport Beach, a wife-and-husband team whose 3 1/2-year-old business, Truly Unique, was one of the first personal chef services in Orange County, are graduates of New York’s prestigious Culinary Institute of America who were chefs at the private Pacific Club.

“But the life of a private chef is very demanding,” said Tom. “You don’t have a normal existence. You work late, long hours and all the holidays. You end up hating the holidays. We decided to try to have a life.”

The new business requires skills beyond the kitchen--scheduling, bookkeeping, bill collecting--but the Mannings have discovered added rewards, too.

“Being a personal chef is exactly that--personal,” said Nadine. “We get to know the people who eat the food we prepare. It’s a labor of love.”

Labor and love are also central to the clientele of Sharon Mellgoza of Cypress, who calls her business the Traveling Kitchen and specializes in expectant and new mothers.

“My service comes in handy during a very uncertain time in a family’s life,” said Mellgoza, 36, who learned to cook from her grandmother, a Swedish immigrant who worked as the chef at the Wrigley Mansion on Santa Catalina Island in the 1930s. “Nutrition is not only important to the mother, but also to her family, which usually loses its cook when she is not available.”

Mellgoza and her family are about to test her theory, firsthand. She is expecting her first child in December. “My husband said I should get started cooking and freezing now,” she laughed.

Longaker, 27, who has been in the business for 18 months, never expected to be a personal chef. She is a political science major at Cal State Long Beach who was putting herself through school as a waitress until her aunt sent her a magazine article about personal chefs.

“When I heard about this, I knew I would love it,” said Longaker, who learned from her grandmother cooking and the necessity of fending for herself in the kitchen as the only child of a single, working mother. “Now I’ve begun taking classes in food services management. I’m learning nutrition, menu modification, safety and sanitation. Finally, I’m also learning how to make a living.”

Depending on the meals, most personal chefs charge between $250 and $300 for 10 dinners-for-two. That’s an average per meal, per person of between $12.50 and $15, about the same as moderately priced restaurant.

Even as he enjoys the taste and convenience of a personal chef, however, Stephen Javier is occasionally nagged by fears of impracticality. He wonders what happened to the part of him whose idea of menu modification was to interrupt a fast-food diet by occasionally throwing a steak and baked potato in the oven.

“It sounds so extravagant,” he said. “When you really think about the food involved and the time you save, I guess it’s cost-effective. When you break it down, it’s kind of a savings, in a way. But we really haven’t mentioned it to anybody. It’s not something we want to throw at people.”

Then again, it’s not something the Javiers are about to give up, either.

“We were right about one thing,” said Stephen. “It is nice to have someone cook for you. It is very nice.”

For additional information from the U.S. Personal Chef Assn., call (505) 898-7472.