The Professional Personal Chef: The Business of Doing Business as a Personal Chef (Book only) Review

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(More customer reviews)I was a little disappointed to see that the first 100 pages or so is a basic primer on starting a business. There are better books for that, my favorite is Small Time Operator. The rest of the text is more of what you would expect, but I think it could go much more in depth. I would like to see the author leave the basic business info, such as whether to incorporate, run as a sole proprietor, etc., to other books and expound on the daily issues of a personal chef. All in all a good basic primer, but I think something more is needed for someone really considering starting a business in this field.

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The definitive guide to a successful career as a professional personal chef
The job of professional personal chef is one of the fastest growing careers in foodservice. People are choosing to become personal chefs in order to have a culinary career on their own terms, with a self-determined schedule and freedom from restaurant strictures. Not only do personal chefs have the chance to work with food in a more creative, personalized way, they are also able to approach their careers with a more entrepreneurial business sense.
Written by Candy Wallace, the founder and Executive Director of the American Personal and Private Chef Association (APPCA) and Greg Forte, CEC, CCE, AAC, The Professional Personal Chef offers the definitive guide for starting and growing a successful professional personal chef business. It covers the skills and competencies required for the American Culinary Federation's Personal Certified Chef certification, and lays out a practical road map for this challenging but rewarding career.
Filled with resources rich in detail, this useful and engaging text covers:
The evolution of the professional personal chef career path
The benefits and disadvantages of various forms of business ownership
Operating legally
Writing an effective business plan
Creating a vision statement, mission statement, and elevator speech for your personal chef business
Managing and securing finances
Identifying target markets and revenue streams
Developing marketing and sales plans and quality customer service
A day in the life of a personal chef

In each chapter, learning outcomes, key terms, and review questions reinforce the key concepts. From the Field features present interviews and real world experiences from working personal chefs.
A complete instructor support package providing business resources, syllabi, and project suggestions is posted on a companion Web site at www.wiley.com, and also offers sample business plans, recipes for menus, forms, and other useful documents.
Culinary arts instructors seeking a classroom text, as well as individual culinary professionals and amateurs interested in starting or growing a personal chef business, will find The Professional Personal Chef the essential A-to-Z guide to this exciting career.

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About Professional Baking Review

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(More customer reviews)I am a chef educator who teaches several introduction to baking courses at a culinary school. Myself and one of my collegues at another institution were interested in using this book, and the publisher was so friendly and inviting. My peer even got to speak with the author on the phone.
The book is fantastic, by the way...by far the best baking text I have seen to date. It is clear, informative, and complete with beautiful pictures and easy-to-follow instructions.
That is compared to Wayne Gisslen's book, which I and several of my collegues use. His approach utilizes much smoke-and-mirrors, unlike Sokol's text.
This book is a great find for professionals and home chefs alike.

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This IACP (International Association of Culinary Professionals) finalist text is designed to present the principles of science that are applicable to baking.Each distinct chapter covers one or a group of related concepts, and contains introductory narrative and background information; an exemplary recipe; and a series of culinary lessons.Additional recipes are included in each chapter, and a step by step, full color series of photos accompanies each culinary lesson.The special features of this text include discussions of science related topics; pastry history; Lessons Demonstrated boxes, which highlight important principles in each chapter; Professional Profiles sections that highlight important culinary figures; and numerous tables, charts, and photographs designed to explain the principles in recipes. The unique presentation of material, the author s accessible writing style, the culinary lessons, and the numerous recipes provided make this text the most appropriate baking text available for today s culinary student.

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How to Start a Home-Based Personal Chef Business (Home-Based Business Series) Review

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(More customer reviews)`How to Start a home-based Personal Chef Business' by caterer / writer, Denise Vivaldo is her second book on a culinary self-employment career, her first being a book on running a home-based catering business. One irony I must point out quickly is that the `home-based' part of the title is just a tad misleading, as the laws of many municipalities prohibit one from cooking food for sale in one's own home without some pretty elaborate licenses and special permits. Some other municipalities require that if you are cooking for a family, this be done in THEIR own kitchen, not yours. Of course, I learn all this from reading Ms. Vivaldo's book, which is one of the things that make it so valuable.
I am very happy to see that the lion's share of the book is dedicated to the details of the Personal Chef (PC) business and not the culinary aspects (recipes and cooking skills) of the job. And, while the author does give us 29 pages of menus and recipes, they are primarily case studies in how to do one of the classic 5 X 4 meals a personal chef commonly does. This 5 X 4 schema is one of my biggest surprises in reading this book. I always imagined a personal chef worked exclusively for one or maybe two families and cooked each meal on the day it was to be eaten. In fact, the most common scenario is to prepare five meals of four servings each, one for that day and four for the fridge or freezer. This way, one PC can realistically have up to seven clients, if they are willing to work seven days a week or double up by doing two families' 5 X 4 setup a day.
The conditions imposed by having to cook in the client family's own kitchen adds a major subject; how do you maintain a traveling kitchen and how must you maintain stocks in each clients home, if at all.
I've occasionally toyed with the idea of taking on the part-time job of PC; however, I believe Ms. Vivaldo has talked me out of this notion. Her book begins with an excellent questionnaire on those things that qualify or disqualify one from being a good PC, and what is the sense of getting into something like this if you will not both enjoy it and do a good job. After all my readings of culinary memoirs, one aspect of PC qualifications is no surprise. To succeed, you really need to be able to work quickly and efficiently, almost, but maybe not quite as rigorously as you need to do in a commercial kitchen (after all, there are some benefits of flexibility in being your own boss and working alone.) It is not NECESSARY that you graduate from a culinary school or work in a professional kitchen to obtain this skill, but both are far better than trying to obtain these skills by yourself. The author did both, and I suspect her success as both a PC and as a caterer testify to this fact.
This book also reveals that there are a lot of relatively unpleasant things one must do in order to succeed, not to mention staying legal in your business. The two least tasteful are probably writing a business plan and accurate pricing of your services. Fortunately, Ms. Vivaldo gives ample advice on how to do these things, including sample forms from successful PC businesses. She also provides contacts to many of these successful PCs if you want to mine some advice from them yourself. I don't recall seeing her suggesting that one route to success is in apprenticing to a successful PC; however, she does give lots of contacts in the business, so that is bound to come up as an option.
As I said, the hard culinary advice is minimal, but what there is I found well directed at a lot of special dietary needs, such as vegetarian, diabetic, infant, elderly, and dietetic needs. The book also contains worthy references to where to find help on these matters. It also contains some excellent culinary Internet sites for recipes and nutritional information. I was surprised that it did not include a reference to [...], which has a recipe library which probably rivals any of the other suggestions. I'm also surprised that there is no central bibliography, which could at the very least list such excellent references as the CIA textbook, `The Culinary Professional', Madeleine Kamman's `The New Making of a Chef', and Deborah Madison's `Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone', three excellent basic cooking textbooks.
This is the third `how to succeed in a personal business' book I've reviewed, and it is easily the best.


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You don't have to go to culinary school to become a personal chef -- a passion for cooking and good business skills are all you need to get started right away. This book provides all the business savvy for the successful launch of a personal chef business.

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