NYC private chefs are going public — and becoming social media stars.
While toques to the elite have traditionally toiled in obscurity, whipping up egg white omelettes, smoothies and elaborate dinner parties for one-percenters, they’ve more recently found food lovers are hungry to watch videos about their lives on the job.
“It’s this kind of secret underground world that not a lot of people have access to,” said Meredith Hayden, a private chef who exploded on social media and inked a lucrative cookbook deal. “And it’s a little bit less staged than your normal cooking video where it’s just a chef on a set … I’m a professional home cook.”
Hayden, 28, was one of the first private chefs to really take off online.
She had previously worked in marketing at Condé Nast while attending the Institute of Culinary Education (ICE) at night, with hopes of eventually getting a recipe developer job at Bon Appétit .
But, in 2020, Hayden was furloughed and started working as a personal chef for designer Joseph Altuzarra and his husband, Seth Weissman.
Around that time, she started her @WishboneKitchen account on Instagram, posting pictures of beautiful dishes she made. But, Hayden didn’t go viral until the following year when she posted a video detailing her weekend as a private chef in the Hamptons, shopping at the market and cooking multiple meals.
The Williamsburg resident now has 2.2 million followers on TikTok and 1.2 million on Instagram.
Last year, she inked a “major” deal — defined as over $500,00 by Publishers Marketplace — for a cookbook, which is due out in May 2025.
“In a month, I make what I would have made in a year [at Condé or as a private chef],” said Hayden. “It’s life-changing.”
Private chef Olivia Tiedemann also inked a cookbook deal for over $500,000 thanks, in part, to her social media fame.
The 27-year-old Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, native went to the acclaimed Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland and worked in Michelin-starred restaurants in the city for years. But she burned out and took up private cheffing for a change.
Tiedemann’s most recent gig over the summer in the Hamptons had her cooking breakfast and lunch for her two bosses, along with four-course, plated dinner parties for them and their friends four nights a week.
“It’s like a 15-hour day … three or four days a week,” said Tiedemann, who lives in Park Slope.
On Instagram, she’s attracted 4.4 million followers, along with guest stars such as Giada de Laurentiis and Benny Blanco, with her unique style — punk rock music, rapid editing, dropping F-bombs and giving the camera the finger while batting her Twiggy-esque eyelashes and showcasing rapid-fire knife skills as she prepares steak tartare or homemade gnocchi with mushrooms.
Tiedemann was worried the her most recent clients — a man who worked in music and his model wife — might not love her blowing up on Instagram as she worked for them, but the opposite turned out to be true.
“They thought it was so cool,” she said.
Maddy DeVita, 25, got her first private chef gig because the client — a downtown Manhattan family with two young children and a popular fashion label — liked her social media savvy.
She ran chef Daniel Boulud’s social media account while attending culinary school and also started her own @HandMeTheFork Instagram account.
Her first post to go viral was a Reel on “egg day” at ICE, where students learn to perfectly cook eggs in all sorts of ways.
“It’s always the ones that you least expect to perform well,” DeVita said. The Reel went on to get more than a million views, and DeVita currently has more than half a million Instagram followers.
Another surprise? How much one-percenters love uncooked seafood.
“They would have sushi or something like it every single day if I served it to them,” she said. “I was like … ‘Should they be eating this much raw fish, there’s like health concerns with like mercury poisoning, right?’”
