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Written by Chris Demaillet, Founder of Montclair Chef. After nearly 20 years cooking inside UHNW households, I've watched the same five hiring mistakes happen over and over. The chef changes. The mistake doesn't.

In 25 years of professional cooking, including nearly 20 years as a private and superyacht chef to billionaire families, I've watched a lot of chef hires succeed and a lot fail. The successful ones look different from each other. The failed ones look almost identical.

What I've learned is that bad chef placements aren't usually about bad chefs. They're about hiring mistakes made before the chef even arrived. Five of them, in particular, account for most of the placements I see end inside 12 months.

If you're hiring a private chef for the first time, or you've been burned by a previous hire, these are the patterns to watch for.

The wrong chef is more expensive than the right chef, regardless of salary. A failed placement costs you the salary, the household disruption, and a year you don't get back.

Mistake 1: Hiring purely on Michelin or restaurant credentials

This is the most common mistake at the top of the market, and it's the most expensive.

A principal sees a CV with three Michelin-starred restaurants on it and assumes that experience translates directly into private service. Sometimes it does. Often it doesn't.

I've watched a Monaco principal hire a chef from a 3-star restaurant in Paris. Six weeks in, the chef quit. He wasn't a bad cook. He was a brilliant cook. He was bad at being alone in a quiet house at 8pm on a Sunday with no kitchen brigade, no sous chef to absorb the pressure, and no service rush to channel his energy.

Restaurant kitchens are loud, hierarchical, and built on collective adrenaline. Private kitchens are quiet, solo, and require self-management for years on end. Some chefs make the transition beautifully. Most struggle, and a meaningful percentage burn out within 12 months.

When you're evaluating a candidate, Michelin background is a baseline, not a differentiator. The real question is what they've done in private service. A chef with five years of focused private experience and good references will outperform a chef with 15 years of restaurant experience and no private placements, almost every time.

What to ask instead:

• How many years have you worked in a private household full-time?
• What was the longest single placement on your CV, and why did it end?
• What do you do during the quiet afternoon hours when there's no one to cook for?

The answers tell you more than the star count.

Mistake 2: Underestimating personality fit

A chef can be technically excellent and still wrong for your household. I've watched it happen repeatedly.

The pattern looks like this. The principal hires a chef who interviews beautifully, cooks beautifully, and has glowing references. The first month is perfect. By month four, there's tension with the estate manager. By month six, the principal's spouse is uncomfortable. By month eight, the chef has been asked to leave.

The chef wasn't bad at cooking. They were bad at integrating into the specific dynamic of that specific household.

Private service is a relational job. The chef is in the principal's home, near their family, around their staff, for years. Personality fit isn't a soft consideration. It's the structural foundation of whether the placement lasts.

What I look for in interviews:

• How the chef speaks about previous principals. A chef who criticises a former employer will eventually criticise you.
• How they interact with non-decision-makers during the visit. The way they speak to the housekeeper at the trial cook tells you how they'll speak to your housekeeper at month 18.
• Whether they ask questions about the family, the children, the household dynamics. A chef who only wants to talk about ingredients and equipment is missing the relational instinct that private service requires.

A chef with strong cooking ability and weak relational instinct is the most expensive kind of hire to undo.

Mistake 3: Skipping the proper reference check

The reference check is the step that gets rushed most often and matters most.

I've seen principals hire chefs based on a single 10-minute call with one reference the chef provided. That's not a reference check. That's a courtesy call.

A real reference check involves:

• Speaking to the previous principal directly when possible, not just the estate manager
• Cross-checking placements the chef didn't list (this requires industry connections)
• Asking specific questions: how the chef handled stress, how they integrated with staff, how the role ended
• Asking the reference whether they would hire this chef again, knowing what they know now

That last question is the one that surfaces the truth. A glowing reference who hesitates on "would you hire them again" is telling you something important. Most principals miss the signal because they don't ask.

I'll also say this: a chef whose references are all from outside private service should be evaluated carefully. A restaurant owner can speak to a chef's cooking ability, but they can't tell you whether the chef will thrive alone in a UHNW household. Those are different jobs, judged by different criteria.

What to ask references:

• Would you hire this chef again? Why or why not?
• What was their relationship with the rest of the household staff?
• How did they handle the principal's last-minute requests?
• Why did they leave?
• Is there anything you wish you'd known before hiring them?

If the reference can't answer all five clearly, you don't have a usable reference. Find another one.

Mistake 4: Hiring before defining the role

This is the mistake that creates the most unnecessary chef quits.

Principals often start the hiring process before they've defined what they're actually hiring for. The job description says "private chef for a UHNW family." It doesn't specify:

• How many meals per day
• Whether the chef provisions or whether the household manager does
• Whether the chef travels with the family or stays at one residence
• How often the family entertains
• Who the chef reports to
• What happens when the principal travels for two weeks
• Whether the chef cooks for staff
• What dietary protocols are in play and who designed them

Without these answers, the chef walks into a job that's whatever the household decides it is on any given day. That ambiguity is what burns out chefs faster than any specific workload.

I tell every family I work with: spend more time on the brief than on the search. The brief is the contract between you and the chef about what the job actually is. If you can't write it down clearly, you can't hold the chef to it, and they can't decide whether they want it.

The well-defined role attracts the right chef and protects them from scope creep. The poorly defined role attracts whoever's available and resentments build silently for nine months.

Mistake 5: Not planning for the placement to end

This is the mistake that hurts most when it materialises.

Most principals hire a chef assuming the placement will be permanent. It almost never is. The average UHNW private chef placement runs three to five years. Some run longer. Most end at some point, for entirely normal reasons. The chef has a family change. A different opportunity. A health issue. The principal's needs evolve.

When the placement ends without a plan in place, the household is stuck. The estate manager scrambles. The principal goes weeks without proper culinary support. Worse, the panic of the situation pushes the household into the next hire too quickly, and the cycle repeats.

What to build in from the start:

• A formal notice period in the contract (90 days is reasonable at this level)
• A replacement plan, whether that's an agency relationship with a replacement guarantee or a runner-up candidate identified during the original search
• An understanding with the chef that an amicable departure is welcome when the time comes
• A documented record of preferences, recipes, and household systems so the next chef can be onboarded faster

The principals who plan for the placement to end eventually have smoother transitions when it does. The ones who don't plan get hit hardest precisely when they have the least bandwidth to recover.

The pattern underneath all five

If you re-read the five mistakes, the pattern is clear. They're not mistakes of cooking judgment. They're mistakes of process.

Mistake 1: Evaluating the wrong signal.Mistake 2: Underweighting the relational layer.Mistake 3: Rushing the verification step.Mistake 4: Hiring before the brief is done.Mistake 5: Treating a temporary role as permanent.

None of these are about whether the chef can cook. They're about how the principal approaches the hiring process. The chef who succeeds in your household and the chef who fails may not be that different from each other. The hiring process is what determines which one shows up.

How I help principals avoid these

The reason I started Montclair Chef is exactly this. After 20 years inside UHNW kitchens, I'd watched too many placements fail for reasons that had nothing to do with the chef's ability. Better hiring processes would have prevented most of them.

When a principal engages us, we start with the brief, not the search. We diagnose any previous chef departures honestly. We do reference work that goes beyond the names the chef provides. We present a small number of candidates who match the actual brief, not whoever's available. And we build in a replacement guarantee so the family is never stuck if the placement doesn't work.

If you're hiring for the first time, or you've had a previous chef leave and want to understand why, schedule a confidential consultation. We'll walk through your specific situation. Sometimes the answer is that you need a chef. Sometimes the answer is that you need to redefine the role before you hire anyone.

Both answers are useful.

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 Monaco with operations in New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and London.

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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