More New Yorkers are hiring personal chefs. They say it costs less than takeout.

Julia Winn never thought she'd hire a personal chef. But a few years ago, she'd returned to work after having a newborn and was struggling to balance her job, parenting and hours of cooking.

Overwhelmed, she recalled some Bay Area friends who'd had a personal chef and Googled around for such a service in Park Slope, where she lives.

"I was open to anything," she said. Eventually she came upon Tiny Spoon Chef, an 11-year-old in-home personal cook service that advertises itself as "for real people."

"It's been incredible for us," said Winn. "Our chef comes Monday midday and cooks, and then things are ready by Monday dinner and we have food for the rest of the week."

Companies like Tiny Spoon Chef are part of an industry that's growing both in and beyond New York City: the relatively affordable personal chef. An analysis from the consulting firm Grand View Research found that personal chef services are a roughly $15 billion industry and projected to grow by 6.5% between now and 2030.

Experts say the demand for personal chefs has been largely influenced by pandemic-era shutdowns, when diners realized they often preferred dining at home and chefs realized they preferred making their own schedules.

Personal chef vs. private chef

The concept of having a cook at your beck and call has long been synonymous with the highest levels of wealth. But the service has been freshly democratized, thanks to a combination of post-pandemic lifestyle shifts and rising inflation, which has driven up the cost of eating out.

A "personal chef," according to several experts interviewed for this , is different from other trendy bespoke meal options. It is not a meal delivery service, a one-and-done special event caterer or some kind of meal kit. Nor is it a "private chef," which is the term insiders use to describe an individual who works exclusively for a single family, a luxury still solely for the mega-rich.

Rather, a personal chef is an individual who cooks meals for a variety of clients from their homes, often once a week. A typical chef might work five hours one day a week, preparing lunches and dinners for the rest of their client's week.

Though the cost of hiring a personal chef is by no means a bargain, fans of the practice say that it's more affordable than other choices they've made around their food budget.

For Winn, the service costs about $550 a week, including groceries. Typically, she said, her designated chef will cook four different dishes with about four to five adult-sized portions per dish. Winn estimates it saves her now four-person family $50 compared to what she was spending on takeout. She still likes to cook on weekends.

Personal cheffing "just wasn't a thing before the pandemic," said Maurice "Chef MoJo" Johnson, a 20-year veteran of New York City food service who has worked in every corner of culinary hospitality, from personal and private cheffing to restaurants and corporate catering.

"No one ever realized that [they] can have this done," Johnson added.

He said that in previous years, fewer New Yorkers knew how to find chefs willing to work in their homes, nor did many realize they could potentially afford the service.

A growing number of websites — including Sous , which launched in 2022, and the TaskRabbit-like websites Thumbtack and Fash , which have customized search tools for connecting prospective clients with personal chefs — have helped raise awareness by making it easier to connect with chefs and compare their prices, experience and specialties.

"People realized the cost of having a personal chef is about the same you would spend for a group of friends to go out for the night on the town here in New York," said Johnson. "So I think that was a huge, huge part of it."

A work-life balance in the restaurant industry

For chefs, the idea of working for a few clients offers a luxury almost unheard of in the restaurant industry: flexible hours.

"The pandemic gave us the freedom to kind of devote all of our time into our own thing, and a lot of chefs got comfortable not going back to [restaurant] work, not depending on that constant weekly paycheck," Johnson said.

Johnson sorts his personal-chef clientele into three main categories: those with a medical motive, such as having elderly parents or dietary restrictions; those who can't cook and can afford not to, but want an alternative to Seamless; and those too busy to. Most of his clients are in Manhattan or on Long Island, with a smaller subset in Brooklyn.

For cooks, personal cheffing often means taking a pay cut from restaurant work or full-time private cheffing work. But for many, the payoff in freedom and per-hour wages is worth it.

"Typically when you work in a restaurant, you're there whenever they need you," said chef Sommer Sellers, who scored fourth place in season 21 of the Gordon Ramsay-hosted cooking reality show "Hell's Kitchen" and has been in the industry for six years. "The busiest days are holidays, so you end up missing out time with your family."

After she switched to personal cheffing in 2022, she found a better work-life balance and wound up making more money.

Janice Carte, who founded Tiny Spoon Chef back in 2013, said she hears regularly from chefs who've worked 120 hours a week in restaurants and are stunned to discover a path where they can set their own hours.

She said the service is also a win for customers, who have another way to access restaurant-quality meals.

"If you live in New York City, you can have anything to your house in 15 minutes," said Carte. "So knowing that that's what we're competing against, the expectations are higher."

For customers like Winn, the only real regret about the trend is not hopping on it earlier.

"I wish I had known sooner," she said.