La Cuisine Personal Chef Service 2023: “A Long-Standing Affair with all Things Edible”

La Cuisine, led by Stephanie Jensen and her team, is a Chicago-based personal chef service dedicated to delivering scrumptious, ready-to-eat meals to individuals who desire nutritious and flavorful food but lack the time to prepare it themselves. DeliveryRank has the pleasure. 

What inspired you to start La Cuisine Personal Chef and provide ready-to-eat meals for busy individuals in Chicago?

I have always had a long-standing affair with all things edible. As a child, going out to eat was something special. But it wasn’t until I was 20 and spent a year in Paris did I truly discover how much I loved food. While I first started out in a career as a public relations and marketing professional, I decided my true passion was elsewhere so I enrolled in culinary school. 

After graduating I knew that I wanted to cook professionally but restaurant hours were not possible as I had a young child. Personal cheffing was the perfect way to maintain a culinary job with reasonable hours and still be my own boss. This became the inspiration for starting La Cuisine Personal Chef Service.

Fast-forward 20 years and I have grown my business significantly, continuing to service a wide range of private clients in the Chicago metro area. Being able to directly reach people through food is extremely rewarding and something I am grateful for every day.

With your extensive culinary background and experiences in both Europe and the United States, how do you incorporate the influence of both cultures into your cuisine and the personalized meals you provide for your clients?

Part of being a personal chef means that you can make anything for anyone. Our clients vary from individuals who don’t have time to cook to those who have a wide range of dietary restrictions. We must be able to adapt our cooking based on type of client preferences, type of cuisine, ingredient limitations as well as a variety of other factors. My previous travel experiences helped to shape my view of world cuisines and have increased my understanding of how to make food taste good no matter what the constraint. There is nothing our chefs can’t or won’t cook!

As a certified personal chef and with your involvement in recipe development for Zavor America, how do you ensure that the meals prepared by La Cuisine Personal Chef are not only delicious but also meet high standards of quality and food safety?

I have always operated at the highest level of food sanitation. Whether it was when I was cooking in clients’ homes or now working out of a commercial kitchen my philosophy has always been the same. Our chefs spend almost as much time cleaning as they do cooking! Our kitchen is spotless and receives high marks from city inspectors. We would never want to sacrifice a client’s health or well-being due to poor ingredient quality or a lack of proper food sanitation and handling. My chefs and I are Servsafe certified and we apply the same high standards whether we are working for corporate clients, families or individuals.

Could you tell us about the different specialties of La Cuisine Personal Chef, such as weight-loss, gluten-free, low-fat meals, ethnic cuisines, and comfort foods?

Once again, there is nothing that we can’t cook! We provide highly personalized meals designed to meet each individual client’s specific needs. Many clients contact us for specialty diets which include all of the categories mentioned above. In addition, we have other customers who are vegan, vegetarian, no salt, following strict diets or going through medical treatment. We often work for families who are able to cook but can’t find the time to prepare healthy meals with fresh ingredients. Some of them would like to expand their children’s palates a bit more. Every client is different! I often say that we specialize in everything because we have an ever-growing list of requirements that our clients demand.

What flexibility do you offer in terms of contracts and scheduling? Can clients call when they need more food or choose regular weekly, biweekly, or monthly deliveries?

Our service is extremely flexible. We do not have any long-term contracts to sign and no set schedule or minimum amount of food that our clients need to order. A customer is free to try us out once and then decide the schedule that works for them. They appreciate the flexibility because many of them travel and need to be able to stop and start the service on short notice. I believe this flexibility is a small part of why we retain a large number of clients week after week, year after year.

If you would like to find out more about La Cuisine Personal Chef, visit https://lacuisinepcs.com/index.html