‘I earn £7,500 a month as a superyacht chef – a wealthy client tipped me £5,000 last week’
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I’ve been a chef on superyachts for 15 years. When I was in my late 20s – I’m now in my 40s – I was a grubby little snowboarder with no money in the French Alps, and I heard people saying they were going to go south to “find work on the boats”. I’d never heard of it before, but discovered there was a whole industry in servicing superyacht guests.
I wasn’t, and am still not, a formally trained chef, but I’ve always loved food and cooking and had plenty of restaurant experience, which got my foot in the door. I worked my way up from stewardess to chef. I’ve since done lots of short courses, from patisserie to sashimi.
For five years I did it full time. The money is good: I’m currently on €9,000 (£7,577) a month, plus tips, which can be anywhere from 15pc to 25pc. I’m working in the Mediterranean at the moment, and just last week a group tipped me €6,000. Wealthy people love to carry cash, so that’s often how I get tipped.
You save a lot of money too. You don’t spend anything on food, and you don’t have time to spend money on anything else.
The money can vary depending on whether it’s a private hire or charter. You’ll get tipped more on charters as you’ll get more turnover of groups, but you’ll be a lot busier, too. A private hire can last longer and be more relaxed, meaning you might be able to take time out for yourself to take a swim or sunbathe, but you might then earn €40,000 less that season.
People think working on superyachts is glamorous, but it’s relentless. Your mental health suffers. I work 17-hour days. I’m currently on a 60-metre boat, which takes about 12 guests. Then there are 13 crew members. So that’s 25 people to cook breakfast, lunch and dinner for.
It’s very stressful. I haven’t sat down to eat a meal for about three weeks. I might chop a bit of extra fruit for myself for breakfast, or I’ll pick at what comes back in from the guests. I’ve lost a stone. It’s not sustainable to do it full-time, and I want to spend more time at home now.
I tend to do two months on, and two months off. But this summer I am working six months straight, with some days off between groups. That’s when my boyfriend will come out to see me.
Apart from that, I don’t really get a break while I’m working.
I usually get up at 6am to put a loaf of sourdough bread in the oven that I’ve already had proving. If we’re lucky enough to be anchored somewhere off France, then one of the crew might take the tender ashore to buy fresh croissants and pastries, which would save me a bit of time.
I then prepare platters of smoked salmon, meats, cheese and fruit. The crew go to town laying it all out beautifully, with elaborate tablescaping. Then I take orders for eggs. This can get frustrating. Someone might order eggs benedict. Someone else might want huevos rancheros. Another might fancy a shakshuka. Before you know it, you’ve got 12 different pots on the go.
Then the guests will go and do some watersports, so I’ll start prepping the crew lunch for around 12pm.
I’ll likely use up leftovers from dinner the night before. Not a lot gets wasted. I might chop up leftover steak and do steak and cheese melts. I would then cook the guests’ lunch for about 2pm. This might be something like a big salt-baked sea bass, a couple of lobsters and loads of fresh, Ottolenghi-style salads, then a light dessert like fruit salad.
As the guests are usually in and out of the water, they usually come to the table in their swimming gear. That might run for two or three hours, then I’ll prepare the crew dinner for about 5.30pm. I usually do pasta then meat or fish to ensure the crew are well fed and happy.
The guests sit down for dinner about 9pm, which is more formal. We’ll do canapes, then it’s usually a theme, like Mexican, Indian, Chinese or Japanese. I’m in bed by 11pm or 12pm.
One of the challenges in this job is having to be so well-rounded across different cuisines, and constantly having to come up with different dishes, especially with all the different diet fads that rich people are into.
You’ll get no carbs, gluten free, dairy free, vegan, no beans, no pulses, only turkey, and you’re like, “What the hell am I going to feed these people?” Then they arrive, and they tell you all they want to do is eat bread, or that they’d kill for a steak.
I buy basically everything that you could think of to fill our huge walk-in fridges and freezers. I always have some A5 Wagyu beef on standby. I have Alaskan King Crab and Chilean sea bass – everything that’s considered high-end.
We use a lot of Beluga caviar which costs about €600 for 100 grams. We had one group that wanted it as part of all their dishes. I load up on ingredients too so you could make anything anyone asks, like quinoa flour if you need to make gluten-free bread. You need to be able to pull anything out of the bag.
It can take a month to get the boat ready at the start of a season. You can easily spend €20,000 stocking up. The key thing is to be as prepped as possible. I always pre-make brownies, cakes and tortes, and backup breads, to keep in the freezer. I pre-prepare salad dressings and sauces like salsa verde.
If a guest says they want dinner in half an hour, I know what I could serve. I do love having the budget to get the best ingredients, so you can produce amazing meals. In between guests, the crew get a day off, but they still need to be fed, so I stock all the fridges for them.
The guests tend to be celebrities or tech billionaires, who have paid anywhere between €300,000 and €500,000 a week to charter the yacht, plus an extra 30pc to 35pc for provisions.
Jon Bon Jovi was my favourite – he and his family were so nice. I’ve made chicken dippers for Cliff Richard and John Barnes, and canapes for Beyonce. Sometimes the guests will get you out to have drinks with them, which is always really special.
We get a lot of Russian billionaires, who are all surprisingly very nice – just demanding. I had one family who wanted a rolling kitchen rather than three set meals, so I would do something like 22 sittings in one day, which was exhausting. I’d do breakfast for some of them at 7am, then another would get up at 3pm and want breakfast then.
Another Russian family had some eccentric friends join them and decided at 4am that they wanted a traditional tomato pasta. I got woken up to help. They wanted to make it themselves, but I had to supervise and hand them ingredients as they splattered tomato sauce all over my galley.
You get some people that just want cheese toasties late at night. And you get the keen fishermen that come back with their catch and want it cooked immediately, when I’ve already got dinner ready. What they don’t realise is that you need to rest a fish overnight to get rid of the rigor mortis.
I worked a Playboy yacht which was pretty raucous – it felt like there were legs everywhere.
One passenger once did a poo on the floor because he couldn’t be bothered to go to the toilet. Drugs are a pretty common occurrence, and unless they do it really openly, we tend to turn a blind eye.
You need to be mentally resilient to do this job – I’m not sure how a restaurant chef would cope. If you have a couple of bad crew members, or the captain isn’t on the ball, things can go wrong and send you into a nervous breakdown. There have been many times where I’ve been on my knees crying in the galley.
But, it’s a good way to make decent money, quickly. Sometimes I think, “That’s it, I’m never doing this again”. But you can work for a month in the Caribbean and earn more than you would in four months in the UK. So it’s hard to let it go.