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Written by Chris Demaillet, Founder of Montclair Chef. After nearly 20 years cooking inside UHNW households, here's how the closed world of private chef placement actually works.

If you've been searching LinkedIn or Indeed for a private chef and feeling underwhelmed, that's because the chefs you actually want aren't there. The top tier of private service operates almost entirely through referrals and trusted agencies. I know because I was one of them, and now I run one. Here's how that world actually works, and what it means if you're a principal trying to hire on your own.

Roughly 10 percent of private chef placement activity is publicly visible. The other 90 percent happens through closed networks. The chefs you want are in the 90 percent.

Why top private chefs avoid public job boards

When a chef has spent 10 or 15 years inside billionaire homes, their professional reputation isn't built on a CV. It's built on three or four relationships with family offices, principals, and estate managers who quietly recommend them when the next role comes up. Posting publicly on LinkedIn or Indeed actively damages that reputation. Here's why.

Reputational risk

The private chef community is small. A senior chef advertising their availability publicly signals one of two things: they were let go, or they're unhappy. Neither helps their next negotiation. Top chefs protect this carefully. The good ones often move between roles without a single public post.

The NDA world

Most of the chefs I place are bound by NDAs that prohibit them from listing their actual clients on a public profile. So even if they wanted to job-hunt openly, their CV would look thin compared to a less experienced chef who's worked at named restaurants. The chef who cooked for a royal family for 8 years has "Private Household, Confidential" on their LinkedIn. The chef who did a 6-month stage at a 1-star restaurant lists every detail. Guess which one looks more impressive on a job board.

Current employer optics

A chef currently employed by a UHNW family who suddenly appears on LinkedIn announcing they're "open to work" creates immediate problems with their current principal. Family offices monitor this. Recruiters get tipped. The chef ends up out of a job before they're ready to leave. So the rule across the industry is simple: never job-hunt publicly while employed. Which means the entire top tier of available talent is, by definition, invisible to anyone scrolling job boards.

How private chefs actually move between roles

If they're not on job boards, where are they? The answer is that the global market for elite private chefs runs through roughly 3 to 5 trusted networks, depending on the region. Most of those networks aren't websites. They're people.

Agency relationships

A small number of placement agencies (the ones who actually focus on full-time UHNW placement, not event work) maintain direct, long-term relationships with senior chefs. When a chef is ready to leave a role, they call their agency contact before they tell anyone else. That agency might have a placement ready before the chef has even finished the conversation with their outgoing principal.

Estate manager and house manager networks

The senior staff inside UHNW households talk to each other constantly. A butler in London knows the estate manager in Aspen. The estate manager in Aspen knows the house manager in Palm Beach. When a chef quits or is moved on, the news travels through this network within days, often before any agency is notified. This is also how chefs get poached, quietly, with no posting required.

Former colleagues

Top private chefs often come from Michelin-starred restaurant backgrounds. Their old sous chefs, head chefs, and pastry chefs all move into private service eventually. These relationships from 10 or 15 years ago become the referral channel for the next role. I've placed chefs because a sous chef they trained in 2008 mentioned them to me in 2023.

Personal trainers, nutritionists, and yacht crew

This one surprises principals. The wellness and yacht crew worlds overlap heavily with private chef circles, especially at the UHNW level. A nutritionist working with a principal in Mallorca might know a chef in Geneva looking to relocate. A captain of a 70m yacht knows three chefs between charters. These adjacent professionals are some of the most valuable, and least visible, sources of placement intel in the industry.

Direct relationships with founders of small agencies

This is what I do at Montclair Chef. 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 if I have anything coming up in 6 months. That's the level of access a chef-founded agency has that a generalist recruiter never will.

What this means if you're a principal searching alone

If you're a principal or estate manager trying to hire a private chef without an agency, here's the harsh reality of what you're working with.

You're seeing the bottom 20% of the market

The chefs publicly visible on job boards, generalist recruitment sites, and culinary platforms are real chefs. Some of them are perfectly competent. But the chef who's spent 10 years cooking for a billionaire family in three countries with a flawless reputation and an NDA stack is not on any of those platforms. You will not find them by searching.

You can't verify what matters most

The hardest thing to verify about a private chef isn't whether they can cook. It's whether they can be alone in a quiet house with a principal's family for months at a time without creating problems. References on a CV won't tell you that. Background checks won't tell you that. Only deep industry references from people who've actually placed that chef before will tell you that, and those references aren't easily accessible from outside the network.

You'll spend months and probably still hire wrong

I've watched principals try to hire directly for 6 to 9 months, interview 15 to 20 candidates, hire someone who looked great on paper, and then have that chef quit within 4 months. The cost isn't just the lost time. It's the damage to the household routine, the family's trust in their staff, and the next chef's willingness to take the role (because the household now has a reputation).

The exception

If you already have a chef network through other UHNW friends, you're in a different position. Principal-to-principal referrals are the gold standard. If your neighbour's chef has a former colleague looking for work, that's a real lead. But that's not searching. That's accessing a network you already have.

The iceberg reality

When I tell principals that maybe 10% of private chef placements ever become public, they don't believe me at first. Then I walk them through it.

In the past 12 months, my agency has placed chefs in homes across Monaco, London, New York, the Hamptons, Aspen, Palm Beach, and Mallorca. Almost none of those placements are publicly disclosed. The principals don't post about them. The chefs can't talk about them. The agency can't name them. The estate managers won't confirm them.

What you see online (the chef agency websites, the LinkedIn posts, the press articles) is the tip of the iceberg. Roughly 10% of activity. Below the waterline is the actual market: confidential placements, NDA-bound chefs, principal-to-principal moves, quiet retirements, internal promotions within multi-residence families, and discreet handoffs between agencies.

This is why every public list of "best private chefs to hire" you'll find online is fundamentally wrong. The chefs on those lists are either retired, doing media work, running restaurants, or operating in the event-based market. None of them are the chefs currently cooking dinner for the families you'd want to learn from.

The real market is closed. The only way in is through someone already inside.

So how do you actually hire one?

If you've read this far, you already know the answer. You need a relationship with someone who lives inside that closed world.

That's the entire reason I started Montclair Chef. After 20 years in private service, including nearly 10 years as personal chef to Amancio Ortega, I had the network. I knew which chefs were genuinely available, which ones were thinking about a move, which ones were burnt out and shouldn't be placed yet, and which ones would fit a specific household.

I don't post my chef bench publicly. I don't list candidates on a website. I don't run job boards. What I do is sit on a network that took 20 years to build, and I match it to principals one placement at a time.

If you're trying to hire a private chef and you've felt like the available options aren't quite right, that's because they aren't. The right ones are one phone call away from someone like me. They're just not one Google search away from you.

Schedule a confidential consultation and we'll talk through your specific situation.

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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