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What's for dinner? More and more busy singles, couples, families and senior citizens are discovering the value and convenience of hiring a personal chef to shop, cook and clean up. Meet a few of the personal chefs serving the South Tampa area.
Annie Faircloth
Chef Annie Faircloth enjoys consulting as much as cooking.
"You have to know a person well to cook for them daily," said Faircloth, 33, a graduate of Le Cordon Bleu in London who lives in Ballast Point.
Four nights a week, she drives to Avila in north Tampa to cook for two families. She plans the menu around whatever she sees fresh at the grocery store.
"We give her carte blanche," said Bob Joyce, one of her Avila clients. "Whatever she makes is fabulous."
Done at the Joyce residence, Faircloth loads her pots and pans into her car and heads to the next kitchen a few blocks away.
Faircloth's fee: $75 to $200 a night, depending on the number of people she is cooking for, plus groceries. Two of her specialties: Asian chicken salad with Thai basil or seared fish with cilantro verde.
"Most of my clients are not of average means," she said. "They have very developed palates, not your average meatloaf and potatoes."
One client, Joanne Webster, gave Faircloth a stack of Weight Watchers cookbooks so she can send Faircloth an e-mail of her meal picks. Webster pays $250 a week for five meals, including the food.
"She'll say Page 37 of such and such a book," said Faircloth, who cooks everything rare, ready to be re-heated.
Faircloth left a sales positions in Boston six years ago to study basic French cooking at Le Cordon Bleu. An offer to be head chef at a holistic health resort in Skyros, Greece, lured her mid-course.
While in Greece, she almost died in a car accident when her cab driver fell asleep at the wheel. Faircloth and two other cooks were thrown from the car. It took her a year to recover.
Now living with her parents, Faircloth concocts custom dining plans for a dozen clients. She is creating a Web site and searching for a space where she can cook and have clients pick up their orders.
- For information, call 857-7218 or e-mail Faircloth at lilliancaters@aol.com
Jessica Raia-Long
The birth of Jessica Raia-Long's son, Zach, seven months ago set her on course as a personal chef.
The Riverside Heights mother wanted to set her own hours and to interact with customers more than an average restaurant chef. Starting her own business, Tonight's Menu, offered a perfect opportunity to do both.
"It's the personal feedback that I really cherish," said Raia-Long, 32, a graduate of Auburn University and New England Culinary Institute in Montpelier, Vt.
"I was tired of being behind a closed door in the kitchen."
As a new mom, she naturally wanted to market her cooking services to new parents. St. Joseph's Women's Hospital agreed to let her distribute brochures.
Another niche: hockey players. Two Tampa Bay Lightning teammates, both single men from Canada, give her access to their kitchens once or twice a week.
"They like comfort food, generally high carbs with a ton of calories because they usually eat after a game," she said.
Recently, a South Tampa personal trainer hired Raia-Long to cook and package 500-calorie meals for him to sell to his clients. One example: a five-spice salmon with basmati rice and Asian vegetables.
All plans include the cost of the food and labor. The most popular have 12 meals for $195 (four servings of three different entrees) and 20 meals (four servings of five entrees) for $295.
The most cost-effective plan for anyone with a roomy freezer runs $395 for 40 meals (eight servings of five dishes).
"For under $10 per person, they eat restaurant quality food at home without waiting in line," said Raia-Long.
- For more information, call Tonight's Menu at 226-8559 or go to tonightsmenuonline.com.
Robert Parrinello
Robert Parrinello couldn't be happier with his "dream career."
"Being a personal chef allows me to control my destiny," he said.
A year ago, he quit his job as preprint manager of Media General's Florida Publishing Group and joined the United States Professional Chef Association.
But he's no stranger to the food business. He has worked for a caterer, a kosher deli, a pizza joint and a hospital cafeteria.
Parrinello, 43, started Your Personal Chef Service out of his home in Town 'N Country. It has changed his life as well as the lives of his clients, he says.
"I save a working couple five or more hours a week in shopping, cooking and cleaning up," he said.
Clients choose from more than 1,000 menu items, then e-mail or fax him their requests.
"Feedback from the previous week creates a Do-Not Repeat and a Please-Repeat list," he said.
Parrinello has 10 steady clients and spends about five hours cooking their orders per visit. His most popular plan offers 20 meals for two adults for $600, including food, containers, labels and reheating instructions.
He usually returns every two weeks to refill the freezer.
A once-a-month plan, "that's almost always singles," he said, costs $300 for 20 meals.
"I don't know any chef who can handle more than 15 regulars a month," he said.
Parrinello thrives on building relationships with his clients.
"I was asked to make a cake for a beautiful 5-year-old boy with extreme allergies to things such as wheat and eggs," he said. "He had never eaten cake before."
Parrinello found a recipe using potato flour and other ingredients the boy could tolerate.
"You should have seen the look on his face when he took that first bite."
- For more information, call 882-0653 or go to www.uspca.net/fl/chefathome
Rick Bolivar
Rick Bolivar started Mobile Chef to offer his experience with health- and age-related diets.
During the week, Bolivar is executive chef of Canterbury Towers retirement community along Bayshore Boulevard. On weekends, he cooks for private clients.
"I take a very personal approach to what I do, and there's nothing I won't do," he said.
A typical two-week rotation of seven dinners runs $300, plus groceries.
"That's 14 meals, cooked from scratch at the client's home," Bolivar said. "Everything is packaged and labeled separately, the protein, the starch and the vegetable. They mix and match."
A sample menu: beer braised brisket with roasted new potatoes and fresh sauteed spinach. Nothing is precooked.
Soup, salad and dessert cost extra.
Low sodium or soft foods are frequent requests among his older clients.
"Swallowing difficulties are common, as are adverse food and drug interactions," said Bolivar, who holds a degree as a certified sous chef from Western Culinary Institute in Portland, Ore.
Bolivar, of Carrollwood, cooks for three clients but can take up to 20.
"In an entire life span, name a day that didn't involve a food activity," he said. "From the minute you wake up until you go to sleep, your well-being depends on how well you're eating."
Bolivar, 34, lives up to his favorite adjective: personal.
"The hidden secret is understanding it's not about you and not about the food. It's about the client. We are called personal chefs for a reason," he said.
- For more information, call 244-8586 or go to www.mobilechef.net
Shelly Ramirez
Shelly Ramirez heard enough horrors stories from restaurant chefs to know she didn't want to go that route. Who needed the kind of aggravation chef Rocco DiSpirito went through on NBC's reality show, The Restaurant?
Last year, Ramirez, 34, set out to fulfill her ambitions in the kitchen. Previously a librarian, her food fantasies were limited to reading cookbooks.
Joining the United States Personal Chef Association sent her through two intense weeks of training in Atlanta. Topics ranged from meringue to marketing. She returned home to Ballast Point and started Personal Taste.
Four full-time clients in her current roster include a young professional couple with a 4-year-old daughter and a single father of teenagers.
"I cook enough in one day to last them a couple of weeks," she said. Ramirez shops, cooks and cleans the kitchen.
A basic two-week plan starts at $275 for five entrees, usually four servings of each, including ingredients.
"Organic ingredients or seafood raises the price," adds Ramirez, who is married and lives with "two cats who think they are my kids."
Her clients expect her to make healthy choices when preparing their food.
"They know I use olive oil instead of butter when I make lasagna and casseroles," she said.
Business booms around Mother's Day and Christmas when Ramirez sells her cooking services in gift certificates. A $150 package offers three dinners for four people.
"One woman, whose mother has Alzheimer's, bought her parents a week of dinners," she said.
Someone else hired Ramirez to cook for a middle-aged man with muscular dystrophy.
"He used to love to cook," Ramirez said. "He stayed with me in the kitchen and really enjoyed it."
- For more information, call 598-5232 or go to www.personaltaste.net