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‍Written by Chris Demaillet, Founder of Montclair Chef. After nearly 20 years cooking privately for billionaires and UHNW families across Monaco, the Mediterranean, and beyond, here's the honest version of this question.

I get asked this question every week. Should a family hire a private chef directly, or work through an agency? My answer surprises people because I run an agency: it depends, and there are situations where I tell principals to hire directly.

What I won't do is pretend the two paths are equivalent. They aren't. Each has a specific use case, and the wrong choice for your household costs you six figures and a year of frustration. Here's how I actually think about it, drawn from two decades inside these kitchens.

For UHNW families, the question is no longer whether to hire a private chef, but how. The how matters more than people realise.

What's actually changed in 2026

The private chef market has shifted in three concrete ways over the past two years. These shifts matter because they change what "a good hire" even means.

The wellness expectation has hardened

Five years ago, "clean eating" was a preference. In 2026, it's a baseline expectation. Today's principals expect their chef to collaborate with nutritionists, understand anti-inflammatory protocols, manage supplementation timing alongside meals, and execute longevity-focused menus without sacrificing taste. The chef is no longer just cooking. They're executing a health strategy that may have been designed by someone else.

A chef who plates beautifully but can't read a continuous glucose monitor printout, or who doesn't understand why a principal wants 30 grams of protein at breakfast, is increasingly unhirable at the top of the market.

Discretion has become the differentiator

Principals are entertaining more at home and almost never publicly. Restaurant reservations leak. Paparazzi watch entrances. Staff at high-end restaurants sometimes sell stories. So the family that used to dine at a 3-star restaurant in Paris now flies in a Michelin-starred guest chef to cook in their Monaco residence, with a household chef coordinating the entire experience.

This means the modern private chef has to operate at restaurant-level execution inside a private home, with full discretion, often without a kitchen brigade to back them up. That's a different skill set than what most agencies were placing five years ago.

The chef travels with the family, not the season

This is the single biggest shift, and it's the one most people get wrong. The old model was seasonal: a chef hired for ski season in Aspen, a different chef for summer in the Hamptons, a third chef for the Mediterranean. Each engagement was short, transactional, and disposable.

The model that actually works for UHNW families today is the opposite: one chef who travels with the family across all residences. When the family moves from Monaco to the Hamptons to Aspen to London, the chef goes with them. The chef knows the principal's dietary preferences, the children's allergies, the household rhythm. The kitchen changes. The chef doesn't.

This is why short-term seasonal placements have stopped being the focus of serious agencies. They're event work dressed up as private service. They don't build the long-term relationship that defines real UHNW culinary support.

When direct hire actually works

Let me start with the case for direct hire, because most agencies won't.

Direct hire makes sense in four specific situations:

• You already know the chef personally. They've cooked for friends whose judgment you trust. The verification problem largely disappears because you have first-hand evidence of their work and character.
• Your needs are simple and stable. Single residence. Consistent household size. Mainstream dietary requirements. No complex travel calendar. The matching complexity is low enough that you can manage it yourself.
• You have time and patience to start over. If the hire doesn't work, you can run the whole search again without disrupting your household.
• You're hiring for a short-term, one-off engagement. A summer house, a wedding, a single ski week. Agency overhead doesn't make sense for these.

If any of those describe your situation, hire directly. You don't need me.

When direct hire goes wrong

Now the honest part. For most UHNW households I've worked with, direct hire creates four specific problems. None of them are obvious until they happen.

1. The response time problem

When you email a working private chef, they're in someone else's kitchen. They're prepping someone else's dinner. They don't have an assistant. Your enquiry sits in their inbox until midnight when service is done. They reply at 1am. You reply the next morning. By the time you've gone back and forth four times, two weeks have passed.

I know this because I lived it for nearly 20 years. When I was cooking for a principal in the Mediterranean, recruiters reached me three days after they emailed, not three hours. That's not a flaw in the chef. It's the reality of the job.

2. The self-promotion problem

When a chef applies directly to your household, they're selling themselves. Every reference is hand-picked. Every portfolio image is their best work. When you ask if they're a fit for your specific household, you'll get one answer.

This isn't dishonest. It's human. But a chef who's spent ten years in Michelin-starred restaurants may not volunteer that they've never cooked for a family with three young children and severe food allergies. A yacht chef transitioning to land may not mention that estate kitchen logistics overwhelm them. You're making a six-figure decision on information curated entirely by the candidate.

3. The verification gap

There's a saying in this industry: paper doesn't refuse ink. A chef's CV can claim anything. Michelin experience, celebrity clients, expertise in cuisines they've barely cooked. Most families lack the industry connections to verify any of it.

You can call the references provided. But those calls only tell you what the chef wants you to hear. They don't surface the placements that ended badly, the skills that didn't translate, or the personality conflicts that ended a previous role early.

This is where industry insiders earn their fee. I know which chefs have left their last role under good circumstances and which haven't, because I'm part of the network those conversations travel through. I lived inside that network for two decades before I started placing from it.

4. The replacement problem

This is the one that bites hardest. The chef quits. Or doesn't fit. Or gets a better offer six months in. Now you're back to square one, but worse, because your household is operating without culinary support during the search.

If this happens in mid-December, with a family Christmas planned across three residences, the disruption is significant. With an agency, you call us. We have replacement candidates ready within days, because we keep that bench warm specifically for this scenario.

What a good agency actually does

Most people don't know what to expect from a private chef agency, so they assume we just forward CVs. Real agency work looks different.

We know the chefs personally

The chefs I place don't apply through a portal. They text me. Sometimes they call me from a yacht in Sardinia at 11pm to ask what's coming up in six months. This isn't a database. It's a network I cooked alongside for nearly 20 years, trained under the same chefs as, and now place into the same kinds of homes I used to work in.

When you describe your household, I can tell you within an hour which three or four chefs in my network would actually fit, and which forty wouldn't, regardless of how impressive their CVs look.

We do real reference work

Reference checking isn't a phone call to a number the chef gave you. It's a conversation with a previous principal or estate manager who trusts me with honest feedback. It's a cross-check against placements I know about that the chef may not have listed. It's a sense of whether the last role ended cleanly or badly.

This is impossible to replicate from outside the industry, regardless of how diligent you are.

We protect your time

A serious chef search done properly takes 80 to 120 hours of work: writing the brief, sourcing candidates, screening CVs, conducting initial interviews, coordinating trial cooks, checking references, negotiating contracts. That's two to three full weeks of someone's time.

You shouldn't be doing that work. Your estate manager shouldn't be doing that work. We do it daily. The hours we save you are real, and the candidates you see are better filtered than anything you'd surface through public channels.

We build in protection

The replacement guarantee is the most tangible benefit. If a placement doesn't work, you don't restart the search. You call us. We activate the network. Replacement candidates are typically ready within a week.

This is the structural advantage that direct hire cannot match, and it's worth more than the agency fee in any household that depends on consistent culinary support.

Specialist requirements where the agency model wins decisively

For three specific use cases, the agency model isn't just preferable. It's the only viable path.

Health and nutrition placements

Principals who follow longevity protocols, work with nutritionists, or have complex medical dietary needs require chefs who can execute against those protocols precisely. These chefs are rare. Most agencies don't even know how to identify them. We maintain a separate bench of health and nutrition specialists because the market for them is growing fast and the chefs themselves are hard to find.

Multi-residence travel placements

A chef who travels with a family across three or four residences earns 15 to 25 percent more than a single-residence chef, because the role demands more. They establish supplier relationships in each location. They manage provisioning logistics across time zones. They adapt to wildly different kitchen configurations.

Finding a chef who genuinely thrives in this lifestyle, versus one who'll burn out in eight months, requires inside knowledge. The wrong hire here is expensive in both money and household disruption.

Kosher and specialised dietary placements

Kosher private chefs, halal-certified chefs, and chefs trained in specific cultural cuisines at UHNW level represent a small global pool. We know who they are. Public job boards don't.

How I actually advise principals

When a principal asks me whether to use an agency or hire direct, here's what I actually say.

If you have a stable single-residence setup, simple dietary needs, time on your hands, and a trusted personal referral to a chef you've already tested informally, hire directly. Save the agency fee.

If you have a complex household, multi-residence travel, specific health protocols, or you've been burned by a previous hire that didn't work out, work with an agency. The replacement guarantee alone is worth the fee, and the quality of candidates you'll see is fundamentally different from what you'd find on your own.

And if you're not sure which category you fit into, that uncertainty itself is a signal. The complexity of modern UHNW culinary support has crossed the threshold where most principals are better served by professional help.

The honest bottom line

I'm not interested in placing every chef into every household. The agency only works if the placement works. So when a household genuinely doesn't need us, I say so.

But for the principals I work with most often, the ones running three residences, managing complex dietary requirements, entertaining at home with restaurant-level expectations, and needing a chef who travels seamlessly, agency placement isn't a luxury. It's risk management.

The right chef in the right household runs for years. The wrong one costs you a year. The agency model exists to make sure you get the first outcome, not the second.

If you're trying to make this decision for your household, that's the conversation worth having directly. Schedule a confidential consultation and we'll work through what your specific situation actually requires.

About the author

Chris Demaillet is the Founder of Montclair Chef, a chef-founded private chef placement agency for UHNW families, family offices, and estates, headquartered in Mallorca with operations in the US, UK and Europe.

Michelin-trained under Michel Roux OBE, Chris spent nearly 10 years as personal chef to Amancio Ortega (founder of Zara) aboard the 70m M/Y Drizzle, and has cooked for billionaire industrialists, Middle Eastern royal families, a British Lord, and American tech principals across more than 25 years in private service.

He is the author of The Private Chef Guide (2026) and The Yacht Chef Guide (2020).

Read Chris's full story or schedule a confidential consultation.

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