Chefs Find New Racket in Teaching Nannies How to Cook for Rich People

 

Sometimes, you can’t be a celebrity chef. Sometimes, you can’t be a chef to celebrities. Since these are the only two options available to professional chefs who want to earn an actual living (the economy is, like, super harsh and stuff), it’s no wonder two of them have turned to running a massive con game entrepreneurship: charging $2,500 to nannies that want to learn how to cook better food for their charges.

Meet Marc Leandro and Mark Boquist, two private chefs who decided to do just that. Except they’re not actually running a school, Julia Child-style: marc&mark will take your hapless nanny, with her student debt and her barely passable quinoa-cooking skills and her being from Wisconsin, and teach her to make “healthful, organic meals that don’t come frozen or under plastic wrap,” a.k.a. everything you’d buy at the prepared food section of Whole Foods, in three days. It is My Fair Lady, except with classes like “The Grain We Deign for Jane Must Be Urbane”:

“Some of these nannies already do the cooking in the family, but they’re throwing chicken fingers in the oven, or worse, the microwave — they’re doing the bare minimum,” Mr. Leandro said.

In today’s foodie culture, in which some fifth graders would rather feast on hand-delivered lunches of locally procured salmon over turkey on rye, the company is playing to moneyed, obsessive parents striving to tutor their children’s palate much the way they would their math skills.

Literally, if it weren’t for these chefs, those nannies would just shovel french fries and poison into the mouths of those tykes, instead of, y’know, real food:

Back at Ms. Johnson’s apartment, the chefs unloaded the day’s groceries as Erela twirled around in her new cowboy boots. Mr. Boquist began preparing the glaze for the citrus-glazed salmon while showing Ms. Hofkens how to debone the fish. In a span of eight hours, the group prepared several dishes, including black rice and edamame, cinnamon ice cream with toasted almonds, and Tunisian couscous with braised carrots.

And thus do the nannies move one step closer to replacing real parents, because that’s how the new economy works.

[NYT]

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