I grew up in a Bagel Bites and SnackWell’s kind of ’90s household, descending from a long, prestigious line of women who did the cooking required of mothers without once pretending to enjoy it.
Take, for example, my Grandma Lillie, a brilliant woman who deserved to go to college alongside her brother in the 1930s, but instead became a beloved homemaker. She engineered her family’s meal rotation down to a science: Monday meatloaf, Tuesday steak and french fries, Wednesday liver and onions, etc. The system freed her up for things she actually enjoyed.
My own mother always ensured we were well fed, with a few signature dishes we could look forward to, although the microwave was her cooking tool of choice. I inherited my mother’s microwave prowess, but have also flirted with cooking over the years.
Living most of my adult life in New York City, there was never much need for it, nor a kitchen large enough to attempt it.
But for a glorious stretch in my early 30s, newly married and child-free, I tied on a polka-dot apron with a frilly sweetheart neckline three nights a week and pretended to be the kind of woman who delighted in making Blue Apron recipes. (Say what you will about meal kits, but they taught me to mince garlic with confidence.)
The domestic-goddess cosplay eventually fizzled out. Recipes started to blur together, especially within my vegetarian constraints, and the weekly arrival became its own household-management problem. And honestly, I just got bored.
Even though I married a man whose parents taught him a thing or two in the kitchen, I knew our family needed help — professional help.
Preparing for service
I hired a personal chef to prep our meals for a week to give me temporary relief from the dreaded question, “What’s for dinner?”
For $1,000 in labor, plus roughly $350 in groceries, our lunch, dinner, and snacks would all be freshly prepped and tailored to our family’s tastes.
It wasn’t quite the luxury of a full-time private chef, which would have cost more than $1,000 a day. Still, it promised something equally enticing: a week in which meals would simply, already, exist.
I came across Chef John Poiarkoff while searching local Facebook groups in the New York area. He grew up helping with his family’s catering business, later trained at the French Culinary Institute in NYC, and worked at MoMA’s renowned restaurant, The Modern. Now, Poiarkoff mostly consults for restaurants and, luckily for me, takes on the occasional private client.
Before he arrived, Chef John and I had a Zoom consultation to map out the week. The chef of over a decade told me he tries to customize each menu to a client’s needs and wants while sticking to dishes that keep well in the refrigerator and reheat easily.
We briefly went over food restrictions and dislikes, but mostly spent time discussing what my family loves: lamb, salmon, and Indian food for my husband; any and all cheeses for me; tuna and cucumber sandwiches for my obviously half-English son; and anything without a face for my newly vegetarian 5-year-old daughter (and me).
Even our discussion of hummus turned granular — did I want cumin and garlic for more heat? We settled on lemon and milder flavors for the meals overall, so there would be a chance my children would eat them.
I was excited to cross off getting groceries at Trader Joe’s from my to-do list since Chef John, who mostly shops at farmers markets and Wegmans, would buy the ingredients. Groceries for his meal-prep clients generally range from $300 to $700 a week, depending on the size of the family and the quality desired.
He also requested photos of my kitchen with the cabinets open so he could see what he’d be working with — a black hole of pots, pans, and Tupperware all missing their tops.
Chef John would do most of the prep at home, then come to mine for four to five hours to finish everything while the kids and I gawked at him.
Chef Day
In the weeks leading up to what became known as “Chef Day” in my household, my son was crushed to learn Chef John would not be sleeping in our basement and on call 24/7 for his snacking needs.
A few weeks later, he asked whether I could write an article about hiring a butler for children. I reminded him that his parents already perform the services of a butler for free, to which he said,”OK, sure, so maybe you could get a costume.”
Anyway, Chef Day began with an unloading of olive oil, spices, knives…and then an unexpected question. “I didn’t bring salt,” Chef John said. “Do you have salt?”
I did! A fact I present as evidence that I am not entirely beyond hope.
A few minutes later, he asked about a blender for the hummus. I couldn’t confidently say whether we owned one. Chef John shrugged it off easily and made do with a small hand blender and a deli container from his own kit.
This, I learned, is the difference between a professional and me. A professional adapts, whereas I would have declared the recipe impossible and ordered Thai food.
For the next few hours, I watched someone cook with a fluency I found genuinely hypnotic. He assembled the lasagna using a restaurant trick, stirring the ricotta directly into the béchamel so there was “one less step” when layering.
He made tofu balls with feta and dill that looked like an elevated version of the matzo balls I’d recently attempted for Passover, adding extra olive oil because tofu lacks the fat that keeps traditional meatballs tender.
Somewhere between the faux meatballs and marinara, I asked whether he had tips for (a totally hypothetical) someone who wants to enjoy cooking more.
“A lot of people think it’s hard because they’re not patient enough,” he said. “Patience is a big part of cooking well and without stress.” Start with the task that takes the longest, and then sprinkle everything else in.
Chef John also absolved me of three decades of guilt in one sentence: The microwave, which he was once staunchly against, is genuinely the best way to reheat rice.
And when it comes to convincing kids to try new foods, even the professional chef doesn’t expect his own children to eat everything. “I always try to give them what we’re eating but then have a backup, like pasta or pizza,” he told me.
(His 2-year-old has recently discovered he can claim that any food he doesn’t want is mysteriously “too spicy,” regardless of whether spice is actually involved. A bold move to try on a professional chef.)
Perhaps most comforting of all, Chef John admitted he doesn’t “meal prep” for his own family nearly as much as people imagine. Most nights, he’s throwing dinner together like the rest of us.
A week of not asking, ‘What’s for dinner?’
After four hours and one very special tuna-and-cucumber sandwich prepared for my son (which he declared is better than his dad’s), Chef John packed up, making good on his promise to leave the kitchen cleaner than he found it.
I spent a good 10 minutes surveying my fully stocked fridge, salivating and sending cruel, gloating pics of clearly labeled containers of all shapes and sizes to mom friends, enjoying the strange, luxurious sensation of dinner waiting for me.
He’d left us with four mains (salmon with dill-yogurt sauce, cheese lasagna, lamb curry, tofu balls), four sides (roasted broccoli, braised carrots, roasted sweet potatoes, spiced basmati rice), a vegetable soup, a marinated chickpea salad, and two platters of “snacks” in the form of deviled eggs and crudités with hummus and tzatziki.
Everything held up beautifully over the week and even lasted into the next. His labeling made reheating idiot-proof (although, as I mentioned, I’m very good with a microwave), the snacks were grab-and-go, and we didn’t even finish the second container of soup.
The kids, to their credit, tried everything, but ultimately ate only a few dishes (the lasagna, the soup, the crudites). I think everything else was too elevated with unfamiliar flavors and textures, or had just committed the crime of not being mac and cheese.
By midweek, I’ll admit, I felt a milder version of the same feeling. The food was delicious, packed with flavor in a way our regular rotation is not, and the smaller portions were also actually satisfying. But I missed standard comfort foods, like scrambled eggs on toast or jacket potatoes with beans and cheese, and dishes I could imagine attempting myself one day.
One of the biggest ROIs from our week of meals is that my husband and I got along better.
Breakfasts in our house are simple (fruit, cereal, toast), and the kids’ weekday lunches are provided by school. My husband and I are aware that every day, week after week, we must feed ourselves and these children, and yet, when mealtime arrives, it somehow always feels surprising and a little destabilizing.
Knowing exactly what we were going to eat, and that it would take no more than five minutes to reheat and plate, lightened our mental load and freed up hours of our week.
I’d love to tell you I used the reclaimed time to sit down properly at my dining room table and savor each meal. Mostly, I ate the way I always do, multitasking and hovering over the warm section of the countertop over the dishwasher.
But a few times we all sat down together as a family, and one morning it even happened for breakfast. My son surveyed the scene. “Well, this is nice. We should do this every morning,” he mused. It was a start.
The verdict
The grown-ups very much enjoyed the taste, freshness, and convenience of Chef Week, but ultimately, for our family, the investment wasn’t worth it since our kids wouldn’t eat the food.
Even with the advanced level of customization offered — which felt like a real dividing line between a personal chef and meal-kit services — we still had to make plainer backup meals all week long.
It doesn’t feel great standing over a pot of boiling, soon-to-be buttered noodles when you’ve already spent $1,350.
Would I do it again? Yes, but with the menu very mindfully tailored for the kids (although with repeated exposure to more interesting meals over time, I’m sure their tastes would evolve).
I’d also want to spend closer to about $500 a week, including labor and ingredients, which is roughly double our current weekly grocery bill.
To hit this price point, we’d probably need the meal-prep services I occasionally see advertised on local Facebook groups — not a professional chef, but more of a neighborhood grandma looking for a side gig.
Still, it was a fun experiment for our family, with about a two-thirds adoption rate. And I’d like to think that up or out there somewhere, Grandma Lillie is nodding, smiling, and most importantly — not cooking.
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