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It was the $800 Uber Eats delivery.
Private chef Andrew Molen had just picked up a call from a regular client, who’d emerged in a panic from the wine cellar of his tony NYC home, hoping to pop up a particular bottle of Champagne when friends arrived — only to find none there.
“I called all the liquor stores I could and finally found one in New Jersey that had it,” the chef recalled. “And I got it delivered.”
Molen is more than a diamond-tier Door Dasher — he’s a classically trained chef who swapped restaurant life with the likes of Todd English for private cooking, often out in the Hamptons.
If the name’s familiar at all, you probably saw him on Bravo’s “Summer House.”
“Carl and Lindsay were breaking up in the background,” he laughed about that memorable point in his career. “You can have a good time doing what you love, watching two people’s relationships go down the tube.”
Cooking for boldfacer clients, of course, you’re immersed in the action but often overlooked.
Private chefs to New York’s fanciest families witness whatever happens behind closed doors, and must always be discreet to the point of silence — at least, usually. Sometimes, they’re witnesses to such strange goings-on, it’s impossible not to dish.
There’s what Laurie Woolever could call the Reddy Whip Affair. She’d scored a fat-free version of the canned cream at the market for her employer, and was psyched — wealthy and health-obsessed, they’d be delighted, she knew, as she stashed it in the fridge.
The next day, though, she couldn’t find it anywhere — at least, until she asked the housekeeper, who’d found it, completely emptied, in the bedroom waste paper basket. Please keep it in stock, the couple said, via their assistant. “I was buying it every day,” she says, pausing, “And every day, it was emptied.”
The only issue came a few weeks later, as the couple started noticing they were gaining weight, despite their exacting diet: could it be the new kink they’d introduced into their night-time routine?
Take one to a lab for testing; they ordered Woolever, in case it was fraudulently labeled.
“I don’t remember which came first: this or the storyline from Seinfeld,” she laughs, of the memorable episode when Kramer & crew wound up fretting over supposedly fat-free frozen yogurt.
Sure enough, the results came back, showing that there were trace amounts of fat in each serving; an entire can, then, was calorie-packed. Their pleasure wasn’t worth the poundage — and they soon packed in that in-private indulgence.
Woolever parlayed experiences like that as a private chef into a role as Anthony Bourdain’s right-hand woman (and turned stories like that one into a memoir called “Care and Feeding“).
Not everyone has that kind of success — New York and its more well-heeled environs are home to an army of behind-the-scenes talents cooking in the kitchens of the ultra-wealthy, dicing and slicing while living on a knife-edge.
And even though full-time gigs like this might offer paydays of $200,000 or more, plus healthcare and benefits, few can weather the intense schedules and absurd demands for long.
“Plenty of private chefs dip their toe into that space, but there is so much turnover — you’re always trying to ingratiate yourself,” one chef told The Post — speaking on condition of anonymity, which many are bound by, either informally out of a desire to keep their jobs, or legally via non-disclosure agreements.
“People walk away because of the way they’re treated,” said another, asking not to be named. “I’d say the quitting to firing is 30:1.”
The budget to feed a family of four among the one percenters will typically hit $7,000 a week, say veteran kitchen jockeys.
That’s mostly due to the fairly typical need to keep lobster, filet and more at the ready should a whim-prone 10-year-old decide they don’t want to eat whatever was pre-planned for that night’s menu.
Many chefs don’t even deal directly with those who’ll eat their food, either: gigs like this are typically what’s known as “turn on your heel” jobs — as soon as you see or hear the family, you’re expected to stop, drop tools and disappear.
Woolever’s gigs were an exception, she said, as she went on to work for other high-net-worthers who wanted to engage with her directly.
Take one, a household-name actress who hired her to cook meals healthy enough to help her slim down for her headline-making wedding. She walked down the aisle fit and happy – then came back from honeymoon to fire her, saying she needed to cut costs.
She did offer Laurie a parting gift, though. “She told me, ‘You’re quite overweight, so I’d like to get you started on Herbalife,’ ” Woolever recalled of the “scammy diet.”
At least Woolever was left in the lurch in New York City, where jobs are easier to get.
Patty Nusser told The Post of a time when she came down with terrible altitude sickness in the Rockies, where she’d been flown from White Plains on her client’s private jet to cook.
Unable to work, the client’s solution was to somehow drive herself hours to the nearest airport and find a commercial flight home.
“I felt like I was going to die,” she recalled, “But they could barely look at me. They were pissed because they wanted their private chef there.”
Andrew Molen has been similarly stiffed, he said, by high-end Hamptons clients who refuse to accept the rising cost of food as reality. At the peak of post-COVID inflation, a couple hired him for a dinner party — or rather, the wife booked his services.
Her husband then called Molen to instruct him to add lobster, seafood and shrimp, top-dollar extra aplenty. But when he sent an invoice after the event to reflect that new budget, she refused to pay more.
“I did not approve this,” she sniffed. “You didn’t clear it with me.” Molen decided to take the loss so as not to generate bad word of mouth from that wealthy pair.
“Now, I take deposits,” he says.
The East End is a treasure trove of tales — another chef, bound by an NDA agreement, talked about the time at the end of vacation season when a wealthy local man sidled into his favorite restaurant, assistant in tow, and posed the award-nominated chef-owner a simple question: “Will you come work for me full-time at my house?”
“I said, ‘So you want me to fire my entire staff, close my restaurant and come work for you?’ ” the flabbergasted foodie recalled. “And he said, ‘Yes, I do.’” The pair eventually struck a deal: that the chef would work as a full-time staffer in low season, and train someone else to roster the summer months while his restaurant was busy.
It lasted for three years, during which the chef was dumbstruck at how carelessly the couple and their kids treated any commitments. Like the time he spent days sourcing market-fresh fish for a sushi spread for the teen daughter’s birthday lunch with friends — and hours creating the rolls.
Two and a half hours after lunchtime, the mom and those teens appeared, raving about the lunch they’d just finished at a local sushi joint.
“They just forgot — it was thoughtlessness, not a flex,” he shrugs. “We got paid for the day, but it was heartbreaking to waste all that fish.”
After that off-season gig ended, the pandemic struck — and some other wealthy regulars invited him to come live in and cook for them at one of their homes, this time in Northern California; they lived with another family on a compound, with two couples and five kids total.
The waste there was so bad, the chef says, that he shelled out for an extra fridge from his own pocket.
“It was just for the housekeepers,” he said, explaining that he’d stash unwanted raw ingredients – think pricey halibut steaks — in there as soon as it was clear the [clients] weren’t interested.
Whatever the staff saw in that secret fridge, they knew it was a free-for-all to take home. When the chef was able to reopen his East End restaurant, he politely concluded that California cooking had turned.
“Those housekeepers miss us, I’ll tell you that,” he laughed.
The two families there were also faddishly Left Coast in their food needs, firing requests at him for low-alkaline meals, perhaps, or a low-carb fodmap-style diet.
He readily admits that he didn’t always adhere to those exacting standards.
“Those demands, on top of the need for restaurant-quality food? It makes for liars. You have to fib about what you’re serving — it won’t matter.”
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