Like Rachel, who started out by cooking for the family where she was also working as a nanny, Jill accidentally fell into personal cheffing. While babysitting regularly for a family, she added cooking to her list of duties and ended up serving as the family’s chef. Since then, she’s created a business revolving around her prized “culinistas”—Jill’s trademarked term for her personal chefs. Unlike other personal cheffing services, The Dish’s Dish has a more structured system. Each culinista cooks for a client just one day a week, spending a few hours in their kitchen making six to eight dishes that are packaged and labeled with reheating instructions. This way, the culinistas can cook for two clients a day—one in the morning, one in the afternoon—and up to 10 clients each week. Though Jill doesn’t personal chef anymore, she ensures that her culinistas are top-notch by giving them dry runs in her own home. She gathers a variety of ingredients for a meal – a couple of proteins like salmon and chicken, along with produce, plus herbs and spices and pantry staples – and gives her potential chef a set amount of time to produce two meals, which he or she packs and labels as if in a client’s home. Jill then tastes the food, and if she’s lucky, it’s “amazing,” she says. But “there has been many a downer experience,” she adds. “We’ve definitely had some inedible food.”

Most established personal chefs don’t worry about serving inedible food, but there are other nerve-wracking experiences. One of Juan’s biggest fears is accidentally leaving the oven on when he leaves a client’s home. Though it hasn’t happened, he had another oven-related near-disaster when he was working in the kitchen of a new client. “I was going to turn the oven on when I realized it had sweaters in it,” he says. “They used it to put sweaters in there. I guess it’s New York, so, small apartments! Fortunately I realized it before turning the oven on.”

“People want the world,” laments Melissa Ricketts, who runs Dynamic Cuisines, a personal cheffing and catering service. When she was first starting her business, she encountered a potential client who “wanted tasting after tasting; she wanted to schedule four tastings and I did two, and after that I was like, you know what, this isn’t working. After one you should kind of get the style, but she was very particular,” Melissa says, adding, “Some people want to micromanage everything and some people just let you do whatever you want to do.”

Having a flexible schedule is a luxury, but sometimes, chefs are required to be a little too flexible. “The challenge with being a personal chef is that you are inside the family[‘s]…schedule, they’re not inside yours. If someone comes to your restaurant, they eat when you feed them,” Rachel explains. Personal cheffing is “‘ok, dinner’s at 6. No wait, dinner’s at 8 and we’re having 10 more people than we thought.’ It was constantly a roll-with-the-punches scenario.”

“There’s a lot of scrambling and re-divvying up things and things getting changed on you,” she continues. “It’s easy to get frustrated. But you know, they’re paying you to do this. This is a service you’re providing.”

While personal cheffing certainly isn’t as idyllic as it sounds, the chefs seem content with their chosen profession.

“I like the creativity,” says Melissa. “I like that there isn’t a set menu…I like the menu planning and working with the budget of the person and even their palate, because some people are like, ‘I don’t like this, I don’t like that,’ and [you] try to create something that’s different. I like that it’s not mundane, you get to meet different people and learn their styles.”

There’s also a personal connection these chefs establish with their clients that they would never be able to do while working in a restaurant. “You see your value to the family,” Rachel says. “And honestly, feeding people is one of the things you can do to make them happiest. It’s kind of joy-making, [enabling them to sit] down to dinner with [their] family. Realizing that you’re giving them this time.”

“The best thing about it is the actual service,” says Jill. “What we facilitate for each client, I feel, is really valuable.” She explains that as a child growing up in Ohio, she had dinner with her entire family almost every single night. “I thought that that was the norm and I didn’t realize how amazing that was and how much I’d really taken that for granted until I moved here and realized that, wow, in other parts of the country people are much more fast-paced and they don’t have time for this,” she says. “Or they just have too much going on, or they don’t care, or mom [or dad] doesn’t know how to cook. So the fact that this company facilitates that, it just gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. I love that. I think that if you eat together as a family, you raise better people. I really believe that.”