Profile

Salary: circa £50,000

Location: Central London

Hours: Monday to Friday, 10:30 AM to 7:30 PM

Position: Live-out, non-smoker

Start date: May 2025

Statutory holiday

Family of eight in WC1 seeks chef to prepare delicious meals.  Because the flat is open-plan and the mother will be breast-feeding, we require a female chef.

Duties include:

--Menu-planning and grocery-shopping at a nearby Waitrose

--Preparation of fresh lunches for the mother and children at home (and packed lunches for the children at school), dinner and dessert.  Plus, breakfast for the next day.  Extra food is made on Fridays for the weekend.  

--Organization and cleaning of the kitchen and dining table area

Baking is a key aspect of this job.  You must be comfortable working with metric and imperial weights, as well as the American cup system.

We admire chefs like Ravneet Gill, Nicola Lamb, and David Lebovitz, who are meticulous in their attention to detail.  

If you’re the type of person who nerds out on the protein content of flours, who enjoys sourcing exotic spices like mahlab or making your own marzipan; if you’re a fanatic about separating cutting boards so that a strawberry tart doesn’t accidentally taste like garlic, and you can keep your sourdough starter bubbling happily away, no matter how busy life gets, this job may be for you.

The other crucial aspect of the job is creative menu-planning.  We prefer to try new dishes rather than sticking to a rota (though of course we have our tried-and-tested favorites).

We like a wide variety of cuisines, including: French, Italian, Japanese, Israeli, and Scandinavian.  We organize the menus around flavor profiles.  For example, if we serve Ottolenghi’s felafel recipe with hummus, salad, and pitas for dinner, we might choose halva brownies or chocolate-pistachio cookies for dessert to keep the Middle Eastern vibe.  Or with Swedish meatballs, we’d order lingonberry sauce to accompany the peas and mashed potatoes, and bake Honningkage.  We like to eat seasonally, where possible, and get excited when Seville oranges hit the shelves in January, envisioning St. Clement’s marmalade in our future.

To succeed at this job, you need a combination of enthusiasm and stamina.   Enthusiasm for learning new dishes and techniques.  Stamina for carrying groceries and being on your feet much of the day.  We’re also looking for stability, a person who wants a steady long-term job rather than a few months, and who’s not stressed by lively children with their paper airplanes and Legos, but is able to work around the children’s school calendar.  Flexibility is crucial since the family leads a busy lifestyle, and the chef needs to adapt to last-minute changes.