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By Chris Demaillet · Founder, Montclair Chef

The question comes in different forms but it is always the same question.

A principal calls. Sometimes it is an estate manager calling on their behalf. They have already spoken to one or two other agencies. The candidates they received felt generic, chefs responding to a listing who were simultaneously interviewing with three other families. The principal sensed something was off but could not quite name it. So they called us.

At some point in the conversation they ask: where do your chefs actually come from?

Where this started

The first Facebook group I built for private chefs started around 2010. Not as a business strategy. I was still working as a private chef myself and I understood, from the inside, what was missing for people in this profession. There was nowhere honest to talk about the work. The discretion the job demands does not leave much room for that, and chefs operating at the highest level of private service tend not to discuss their professional realities publicly. But they need to talk. About the difficult dynamics, the logistical pressures, the particular strangeness of working inside someone's home, yacht, or estate for months at a time with almost no separation between your professional life and everything else.

The group grew. Facebook shut it down.

We had also built a dedicated group for yacht chefs, Yacht Chef Wanted, which ran for eight years before Facebook closed that one too, unfairly and without meaningful recourse. We rebuilt everything. The current Private Chef Wanted group has 105,000 members today. It launched in November 2021 and grew faster than anything we had built before, partly because the community we had spent years developing was already there, waiting. The Rotational Superyacht Chefs group, focused specifically on yacht positions, has 36,000 members and remains active. We moved conversations to Telegram when Facebook became unpredictable. We built a newsletter that goes out to 5,500 people every week. We have a WhatsApp group. We have a job board with 7,500 registered chefs as of today.

I am not listing these numbers to impress anyone. They are the answer to the question. This is where the chefs come from.

What fifteen years of running these communities actually teaches you

When you run a professional space for long enough, something changes in the quality of the conversations.

People stop performing and start talking.

The chef on a yacht in the Adriatic messages at midnight about a logistical problem with a new crew member. The private chef for a family in Mayfair asks about sourcing a specific Japanese ingredient in London on short notice. A Michelin-trained chef who has been in the same private placement for seven years quietly asks what the market looks like right now, whether it might be time to consider something new.

That last category is the one that matters most for what we do.

The best private chefs rarely broadcast their availability. When they start thinking about a change, they feel it out quietly, in communities where they have been talking to colleagues for years. They do not post their CV. They ask a question. They test the water. And because I have been running these spaces since 2010, I am part of those conversations. I know who is asking before anyone else does.

That kind of knowledge does not come from a database. It comes from being genuinely present in a professional community for fifteen years.

The 70 percent figure

I cannot tell you which families employ the chefs I am referring to. That is the precise discretion that makes the relationships worth having in the first place.

What I can say is that when I think about the ten wealthiest households in the world, I can account for roughly 70 percent of the private chefs currently working inside them. Some I placed. Many I know through the communities. Some have been in our WhatsApp group for years. Some reached out after reading something I wrote. Some I crossed paths with on yachts a decade ago and we have stayed in touch since.

When a chef in one of those placements is approaching a transition, we often know months before anyone outside the household does. The family does not know yet. The chef has not made a formal decision. But the conversations have started, and those conversations happen in the spaces we built.

How placement actually works because of this

When a family comes to us with a brief, we do not post a listing and wait for applications.

We go through the network with the specific brief in mind and reach out to people we already know. Chefs whose cooking we understand, whose record in private service we can speak to from direct knowledge, whose temperament and discretion are not a guess. Many of the chefs we contact are not actively looking. That is the point.

A chef who was not looking but trusted us enough to take the conversation is a different candidate from someone who applied to a job posting. They came to the conversation with more care. Families feel that difference, even when they cannot explain why.

The 7,500 chefs registered on our job board give us additional reach when a specific specialisation or location requires it. The newsletter audience keeps us present for chefs thinking quietly about what might come next. But the placements that last, the ones that feel like the chef had always been meant for that household, those come from the network. From a WhatsApp message. From a conversation in the Facebook group that started about something else entirely.

Why we turn clients away

This network works because the chefs trust it.

The moment we compromise on the quality of a placement, or work with a client whose expectations were never properly disclosed to the chef going in, that information moves. Chefs talk to each other. In a community of 105,000 people, a bad placement does not stay quiet for long.

So we are selective. We turn down clients. We turn down chefs when the fit is wrong. The placement has to make sense from both sides, and we need to be comfortable standing behind it, because in communities this size, our name is always in the room whether we are or not.

That selectivity is what makes the access possible. It is also, in our experience, why families who have worked with us tend to come back.

For the families reading this

The question, when you call us, is always some version of the same thing: where do your chefs come from?

The answer is fifteen years of community building, two Facebook groups rebuilt after being shut down by a platform that gave us no warning and no appeal, a Telegram channel, a newsletter, a WhatsApp group, and 7,500 registered chefs on a job board. It is a midnight message from a chef on a yacht who trusts us enough to say they might be ready for something new. It is the kind of relationship that accumulates when you have been genuinely present inside a profession for long enough that people stop thinking of you as an agency.

That is where the chefs come from. And it is why the ones we place tend to stay.

Chris Demaillet is the Founder of Montclair Chef, a private chef placement agency specialising exclusively in full-time placements for UHNW families globally. Trained in a Michelin-starred restaurant. Private chef to billionaires for 19 years. Based in Palma de Mallorca.

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