“It’s 1 a.m. I’m in the Ritz Hotel kitchen in Moscow, and I don’t speak Russian, but I know I have to have a whole dinner, snacks and food for the next day ready for my client, who’s on his way to the hotel.”

That’s Los Angeles chef Kat Turner, who worked for 10 years as a private chef for a bona fide global rock star and an A-list Hollywood actor before opening Highly Likely, her chain of four successful cafes in LA and Ojai. Like many of California’s private chefs to the rich and famous, Turner’s life for that decade was marked by last-minute travel, absurd requests, and cooking in unknown places and challenging venues like the teeny-tiny galleys of private jets. 

“I had to have my passport on me at all times, because you might get 24 hours’ notice that you have to go somewhere,” Turner says. “At one point, I had two passports, because one might have to be sent out to get a visa approved.”

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Chef Kat Turner cooks in a Japanese hotel for her A-list Hollywood client.

She recalls going on a press tour with the actor where she and his team went to three continents and seven countries in less than two weeks. At every stop, she had to navigate hotel kitchens and local grocery stores — often without speaking the language of the country she was in — to simply do the job of feeding her client. Turner would even be sent out on occasional food tasks, like finding “a really good hot dog” in various countries on the client’s “cheat days.”

“I had to get new pages stapled into my passport because I ran out,” Turner says. 

When Turner was on tour with her musician client, she would be set up in the kitchens of concert venues and arenas.

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“I knew the set list, so when the encore started, it was a ticking clock of how long it would take to play the last three songs. I’d have dinner ready when he came offstage,” Turner says.

Before she became a restaurant chef and owner, Kat Turner worked as a private chef for Hollywood elites.

Turner’s stories are just some examples of the wild requests made of often unseen chefs who work in the homes (and on the private jets and yachts and multiple properties) of LA’s richest individuals. With unlimited budgets but exacting clients, the job can be equal parts rewarding and unnerving — and is almost always cloaked in the secrecy of immense wealth. Even today, years later,........

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