when you want, where you want.
TikTok Chefs Have Upstaged Their Clients
Video: alexbakerstudios, sethboylan, wishbonekitchen
It’s a busy Wednesday morning at the Union Square Greenmarket, and Alex Baker and I are perusing produce. She has to meal-prep for the family she works for full time. Soon, she says, they’ll all be headed out East for the season. This summer will be Baker’s fifth in East Hampton and her third filming her workdays, i.e., posting videos of herself setting up dinners on the beach and grilling asparagus. It was a friend’s idea — she’d noticed the success of other “Day in the Life of a Private Chef” videos on TikTok, like those posted by the 29-year-old private chef turned content creator Meredith Hayden, who has amassed millions of followers and a cookbook deal under the handle @wishbonekitchen. “At first, I was like, I feel like I’m too old for this,” Baker says. “But the first summer that I started to post, I got, like, 20 dinners from it.” While private chefs might typically be bound by the usual expectations of the household staff they work beside — there for their utility and otherwise unseen — this boom of interest in “Day in the Life” content is creating a new breed. No longer an anonymous set of hands, they’re becoming online personalities, shifting the traditional power dynamics. “Of course, having a platform allows me to be more selective about the opportunities I’m taking,” chef Seth Boylan — who has nearly 80,000 followers across his social-media platforms — told me recently. “The thing about this job is it’s equally important for me to vibe with a client as it is for a client to vibe with me.” After two summers working for full-time clients, now Boylan will go freelance, bookable only by request.
Private chefs in the Hamptons, like personal trainers or tennis pros, tend to cater to a particular clientele — celebrities and people in finance. Often, they are members of a small team: a house manager, who might spend the entire year on the property attending to broken sprinklers and keeping the home in order, along with seasonal additions such as trainers, gardeners, nannies, and maids. It’s a grueling job and often intimate and strange. Another personal chef, who asked to remain anonymous, recalls her early days working for a successful financier, which taught her to “understand these kinds of personalities, how to be in their space.” She tells me, “A lot of chefs get an ego and are like ‘Fuck you’ if you don’t say please.” Other chefs noted that, owing to the demands of the schedule and the fact many are living with their clients, they are most in contact with the other household staff, ironing out the pain points in their clients’ busy lives. Creating content can be valuable in this dynamic, a way to access bigger opportunities and gain power. Baker remembers being referred by a friend to a celebrity client who wanted to book her, then, after getting her quote, said they couldn’t pay it. “I wondered, If I was someone like Meredith, would it have been like, ‘Sure, no problem’? ”
It’s an appealing proposition — to live on a stunning summer property, shopping local at farm stands, all the while building a platform that can lead to brand and book deals — so attractive, apparently, that some creators have hacked the trend. Rumors have long circulated around certain online creators “faking it,” going so far as to rent Airbnbs to pose as client kitchens, branding themselves as Hamptons private chefs until the illusion becomes reality. “You’re the creator of your own narrative,” says one chef, Reilly Meehan, about the rumors surrounding one such creator, who was eventually hired by a “very well known” client. “Your social media can become your narrative; you can make it however you want it to seem.” Not long after Hayden began posting her “Day in the Life” videos, her followers uncovered that her employer was the fashion designer Joseph Altuzarra. Today, Hayden has 1.3 million followers on Instagram, about 1.2 million more than her former employer and 300,000 more than the successful brand he built. Last year, she bought a house in Water Mill for close to $3 million. In a very real sense, she has eclipsed him. When I ask Baker — more than a decade into a career as a chef that has spanned restaurant kitchens and private Hamptons homes and several years into her “second career” as a content creator — if a path comparable to Hayden’s appeals to her, she says, “What I love is cooking, not making videos of myself cooking.” She pauses. “But if you get to the point where you’re so famous that they offer you a TV show, would I do that?” she asks. “Yes.”
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