TORONTO — Robyn Goorevitch’s cooking career started when she was tall enough to reach her mother’s stove.
Robyn Goorevitch is the first Canadian to win the personal chef of the year award from the United States Personal Chefs Association.
“I actually learned to cook at the hands of my mom,” said Goorevitch, owner of Dining In Chez Vous, a personal chef service. “I didn’t know there were such things as store-bought cookies and candies until I started elementary school.”
Goorevitch, who trained at Le Cordon Bleu Ottawa Culinary Arts School, was recently named the personal chef of the year by the United States Personal Chefs Association. She is the first Canadian and second woman to win the title.
For Goorevitch, cooking is about creating. As a personal chef, she’s often making new recipes from scratch or personalizing recipes to fit her customers’ needs.
“It’s a fun process,” she said. “Generally, what you do is you start creating the dish, you taste it and say, ‘I think it’s missing this, what can I put in?’… It’s like playing with your food.”
Goorevitch first started creating recipes at a seafood restaurant in Edmonton, Alta.
“The desserts were terrible,” she said of the restaurant. “I said, ‘Even I could do better.’”
And after awhile, the owners took her up on her offer.
“By that time I was working 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. as a legal assistant, three times a week in the restaurant and making desserts,” she said, adding that she was in her 20s.
“I said, ‘This is crazy. What do I want to do with the rest of my life?’”
Goorevitch’s answer lay in the Caribbean. She packed up her life, got on a plane and landed in the Cayman Islands, where she began creating desserts for the only five-star restaurant in Grand Cayman.
“I sold everything that I owned, moved to Grand Cayman, worked at a restaurant and dove during the day. Life was grand,” she said.
After spending about eight years in the Caribbean, Goorevitch decided it was time to move on and left the tropics for Canada. Unable to find a job in Toronto, she enrolled in George Brown College and then switched to Cordon Bleu in Ottawa.
Instead of working at another restaurant after school, Goorevitch decided she was ready to go into business for herself. In 1999, she joined the first Canadian branch of the United States Personal Chefs Association, which has some 130 active Canadian members, and started Dining In Chez Vous.
As a personal chef, Goorevitch shops, cooks, serves and cleans up for clients.
“People first said, ‘Nobody’s going to want a stranger in their home,’” she said.
It took the chef three years to break even, but then business began to boom.
“It’s fun to create your own menus. [Customers] say, ‘I’m lactose intolerant,’ you could create a dairy-free risotto,” she said.
Goorevitch has worked in kosher households, where the clients will do the shopping and provide utensils.
