Fall is a busy time for families with children, when laid-back summer schedules turn to color-coded calendars of school drop-offs and sports practices. It’s also a busy time for Gather Round Chef Service, a personal chef biz that helps those families get dinner on the table.
Every week, owner Ariel Voorhees and her team of three professional chefs head to more than a dozen homes in Chittenden County and along Route 100 from Warren to Stowe, groceries in hand. A few hours later, fridges are full of meals made with seasonal produce and designed around each client’s preferences and dietary restrictions. They even clean the kitchen and take out the trash.
The service isn’t cheap: A cooking session runs from $450 to $650 plus groceries for family-size servings of three to five meals. But it’s more approachable than the realm of private chefs, who are typically salaried home employees, and in line with the price of similar services across the country, which typically range from $300 to $1,200. For some customers, reducing the mental load of meal planning and prep is worth the cost.
Stephanie Phillips, a Burlington attorney and mother of three who’s been using Gather Round for about a year, said hers “didn’t feel like the kind of family I would normally have pegged” for having a personal chef. She’d tried all the subscription meal kits and wasn’t happy with the quality or amount of packaging involved.
“I was trying to be ahead of the impossible-to-be-ahead-of game of continuing to feed my family,” Phillips said. “No matter how well I solve that problem, it comes back. They still need to eat the very next day.”
More often than she liked, the answer was takeout. Now, Voorhees comes to her house every other Wednesday to cook four meals, and the cost “isn’t drastically more expensive than regular takeout for a family of five,” Phillips said. Plus, her picky children are eating dishes such as curried split-pea soup, a favorite from February that they still talk about.
A variety of dishes from Gather Round Chef Service Credit: Courtesy
Gather Round itself started as a stress reducer. In 2019, Voorhees was living in Washington, D.C., working as a high school English teacher and “in the process of burning out,” she said. The self-taught cook used time in the kitchen to decompress and daydreamed about making it her job. That summer, she left her 14-year teaching career and donned her apron full time.
In 2023, she moved to Vermont, where her spouse grew up, and brought Gather Round with her. Voorhees quickly found that relationships were even more important in the small state’s tight-knit market.
“People really want to know you before they work with you,” she said.
Thankfully, she wants to know them, too. Cooking in clients’ homes allows the Gather Round team to alter spice and salt levels, substitute ingredients, and make other “micro-adjustments” that are hard to do on a larger scale in a commercial kitchen, Voorhees said. After a kickoff meeting full of “really intrusive questions,” the chefs know each person’s likes and dislikes before they start cooking any of the globe-spanning options in Gather Round’s repertoire.
For Cathy Armstrong, a South Burlington business owner, having the fridge stocked with favorite Gather Round dishes such as cornbread tamale pie and chicken shawarma “[makes] it easier for us to focus on family time and not make bad food decisions,” she said. The three meals she gets every week — six servings each — are less expensive than the cost of dining out all the time, which she did with her kids and grandkids before hiring the chef service three years ago.
Gather Round is close to capacity now, Voorhees said, but she hopes to continue growing and hiring chefs in the future. The biz also offers monthly and one-off “pack the freezer” plans, which tend to appeal to families welcoming new babies or people recovering from surgery.
“I want to be known as the company you call if you have an intense moment in your life, when you need some help or support for good food,” she said.
And Voorhees hasn’t totally stopped teaching: She often offers cooking classes, including a monthly series at Waitsfield’s Addison West happening now through early spring. ➆
Dining and Cooking