StarChefs.com Career Series at the Astor Center – Session Three

Chefs’ Personal Assistants

December 2008

This third installment of our career series features four tireless assistants to famous chefs. Being a chef’s personal assistant isn’t all about shopping for knives, scheduling interviews, and fending off overeager fans – it takes stamina, tact, business savvy, and an uncanny ability to organize part of another person’s life.

Sometimes an assistant handles press relations or marketing for a restaurant group or manages other employees. Chefs’ assistants often travel for book tours, TV appearances, lectures, and other public appearances with their chefs. They’re also on call 24 hours a day, and need to be flexible and creative in finding solutions to problems they’d never imagined that materialize out of thin air.

Rachael Carron (assistant to Wylie Dufresne), Beth Aretsky (assistant to Anthony Bourdain), Kristen Gegnas (assistant to Charlie Palmer), and Christa Weaving (assistant to David Burke) share the daily ins-and-outs of their jobs and give advice on how you, too, can be a famous chef’s right-hand person - and an integral part of their business.

Watch the podcast to learn what skills it takes to fulfill this diverse, challenging, and very necessary role, whether for the head of a restaurant empire, a working chef at an independent restaurant, or a world-travelling TV personality.

StarChefs.com Career Series at the Astor Center – Session Three

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