How Much Does It Cost To Hire a Private Chef?
One of the questions that we get asked all the time is “How much does a personal or private chef cost?”. The answer to this question might actually surprise you. Hiring a chef for a private party actually costs much less than you might think. As we have grown, we have really had to dial in our pricing and even though we try really hard to make it seamless, with inflation and rising gas prices, we have to watch our numbers as we obviously are trying to run a business.
That said, we like to say hiring an in home chef should cost you somewhere in the ballpark of going out to eat at on of Austin’s best restaurants. We don’t ever want to make it unaffordable and we definitely have our eyes set on making lasting impressions over gauging people. We see a lot of our competition in town trying to over charge and we just think that is not only unethical but also downright wrong.
In order to fully understand our business model you have to dive into why we are here in the first place. When we decided to create Gather and Forge Private Chef Services, we had 2 missions. Mission one was to figure out how to educate potential clients about the industry as a whole and mission two was allowing chefs to collaborate with clients so they could also make money money doing what they love to do… which is cook.
Gather and Forge contracts out its chefs to seeking clients and we operate on a revenue split business model. We literally take half of our sales and split it with the chef so that they too can make their financial dreams come true. Most companies do not do this and continue to pay their chefs very poorly which is a backhanded offer to anybody that has gained the experience needed to be able to do this kind of work. What we do is not easy and really needs 5+years of experience in order to really feel comfortable doing it.
We constantly try to make menus and one of the things that Gather and Forge does is we make 100% custom menus for each of our clients. This might sound unscalable and that is because it is.. we really want to make sure that we are standing by our “why” and that sometimes means that we have to leave money on the table. In business, I feel as though doing the right thing is often times overlooked by wanting to make more money and that to me is the wrong way to look at business. In my mind, the money will come but it will only come if you are treating your people right and allowing them the opportunity to earn more as well.
You see, the restaurant industry is broken and there are a lot of people out there that are not in the restaurant industry that simply just do not know that. A chef in a restaurant is typically required to work 60+ hours a week on an average salary (in the United States) of $42,450.00. If you begin to do that math, that breaks down to $13.60/hr. How sickening is that? I mean really, restauranteurs really think this is okay and most of the time they get people to work for even lower than that and advertise it as “gaining experience”. I am so sick and tired of hearing chefs living below the poverty line in order to be able to do what they love. Where is the human decency in that and how can you feel good about offering such a low pay and high demand? It makes no sense to me now and it never has made any sense to me.
As a matter of fact, I remember my last restaurant job. It was at a very high end restaurant here in Austin, Texas and although I loved going to work, the highest I ever got paid was $11/hr. My paychecks were literally $425/wk. At one time I was living in my friends kitchen on a futon and dressing myself out of a suitcase.. yes, that is how poor I was. This brings me back to how much it costs our clients to have an in-home chef.
It might cost marginally higher than going to a restaurant but at the end of the day, what you are paying for is a completely custom experience, one that you literally cannot get anywhere else. We pride ourselves on being the best and we stand by our pricing because we know that with each dinner party that we book, we are contributing to helping a chef rise above the poverty line. So far, Gather and Forge has helped 9 chefs rise above and we are just getting started. Hiring a private chef in Austin is an amazing and fun experience and one that we hope to continue to do forever, even if inflation and gas prices try to take us down.
We always want to thank our customers from the bottom of our hearts for allowing us to even be on this amazing journey. We wouldn’t be here without each and every single one of you and that to us lets us know that we are doing something right. We are going on 7 years now and we couldn't be more thankful to have such an amazing community behind us because really, without you guys, we don’t have anything. I believe that in-home chef work will continue to be on the rise and it is my promise to my chefs and customers that I will continue to combat the low paying restaurants so that the chef community can feel what it is like to live in abundance.. like the rest of the world.
Please, if you are on the fence about hiring a personal chef in Austin, contact us so that we can go over pricing with you and we at least have the opportunity to earn your business. We promise to make it worth every penny.
-Ryan