Well guess if you are a star, you want to stay skinny no matter what the price. Well here’s how they do it. They have the money to pay a private chef to make them skinny. I guess I’ll just have to stay the way I am because they spend more on their chef than I do on food in a year. Must be nice.
What stars really eat
Stars pay to eat right. And they pay big. A full-time private celebrity chef earns an annual salary of up to $150,000 plus health benefits; the average rate for such chefs in Los Angeles not on salary is about $350 to $500 per day. And the grocery budget?
“There is no budget,” says Suyai Steinhauer, a former contestant on “Top Chef” and now a natural-foods chef with celebrity clients in L.A. “The higher famous people are on the food chain, the more they spend on the ingredients they eat.”
The interview for such a job is anything but typical. Consultations cover the basics: the celeb’s favorite foods and dietary preferences (whether vegetarian, no red meat, no green M&M’s, etc.), the chef’s food philosophies, and beyond.
“One of my clients is a world-famous clothing designer who cares more about the looks of her chef than the taste of the food,” says Christian Paier, CEO of Beverly Hills-headquartered Private Chefs Inc., whose 2,000 chefs have cooked for stars like Cameron Diaz, Tom Cruise, Demi Moore, and Brooke Shields, among others. “The designer has business meetings in her house, so it’s very important to her that everyone in the home has a thin, model look to maintain her company’s image. Before sending chefs over, I sent over head shots.”
Celebrities’ meal requests change as often as the latest diet books do. Right now, the biggest demands are for raw-foods chefs (like Jill Pettijohn, who has worked for stars like Drew Barrymore and Nicole Kidman). And chefs specializing in macrobiotics-the grain-and-vegetable-based diet that severely limits dairy, meat, sugars, preservatives, refined flours, and refined salt-are popular with stars like Gwyneth Paltrow.
“Macrobiotics is hot,” Paier says. “I have a bunch of brothers who are all actors and have their own macrobiotic chef. There’s also a female singer who hires a macrobiotic chef when she tours, because the diet gives her great energy.”
A chef to the stars has to deal not only with the demands of his or her client, but with those of the celeb’s friends and colleagues, too. Paier spent eight years cooking for an A-lister living in Bel-Air, whose dinner parties required some serious reconnaissance.
“Any time you work in a high-profile home, there’s a book containing the allergies and food likes and dislikes of all their friends,” Paier explains. “When I’d cook a dinner party for 15 A-listers, the book would say 12 of them had allergies I had to work the menu around.” But, he adds, “they were rarely real allergies. They were usually just things people didn’t want to eat, like cucumbers and beef.”
In addition, Paier often had to contact the personal chef of each guest to find out if there were other dietary restrictions. “If the guest was on, say, a macrobiotic diet,” Paier says, “his or her personal chef would come and drop off spices or macrobiotic salts I didn’t already have.”
