At the age of 21, Beeta Mohajeri had her heart set on being a dentist. The financial stability and opportunity to help people drew Mohajeri into the career path, as well as pressures from her family. She was in the midst of her undergrad, studying biology. Mohajeri followed this aspiration all the way to pre-dental school at the University of Washington. In five short years, Mohajeri’s passions and career completely changed, and therefore, so did her life. At age 26, she graduated pre-dental school. Then, instead of continuing to dental school, she began culinary school.
“I grew up in a Persian house where you can be a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, a pharmacist. These are your options, right? Being a chef is not a thing. So, it was hard because I was on a path of doing what I was supposed to be doing,” Mohajeri explained.
Despite Mohajeri’s family pressures, she doesn’t regret it. Not for one second.
Unlike other chefs in a similar field, Mohajeri’s passion for cooking came from eating. The ability to feed herself, her friends, and her family with food she enjoys drew Mohajeri to pursue the culinary arts as a career. Starting by cooking for friends in college, Mohajeri’s introduction to the culinary scene was slow and steady.
“I feel like my passion for the industry comes from my own hunger, you know what I mean?” Mohajeri asked. ”Like the fact that I want to eat all the time, and I want to eat all these things, and I really feel like the ability to cook anything is kind of like a superpower.”
Growing up in Calgary, Alberta, a small town in Canada, Mohajeri understood that nobody from her town “made it big”. Despite her apprehensions, Mohajeri’s dedication and passion brought her to the career that she has today. After culinary school, and a small stint in New Orleans, Mohajeri worked for a catering company, only earning around $15 an hour at the age of 27. Pursuing catering to get a taste of the culinary scene, she also worked as a bartender on the side in order to build a social circle in Los Angeles.
After very few hourly wage raises, Mohajeri felt her career had gone stagnant. She then pitched herself to a private chef agency, which connected Mohajeri to clients and allowed her to make $35 an hour. At that stage, Mohajeri’s first client was a household name: Simon Cowell. Working as his private chef for around three years on and off, her name was now within Los Angeles’ bustling world of entertainment.
Her next clients, Russell and Sierra Wilson, required her to travel to Seattle often. Continuing to put her name out into the industry, Mohajeri was also working side hustles: slanging meal prep to various clients. Then, Covid-19 hit. While many industries took a hit in the pandemic, the pandemic only motivated Mohajeri to focus on where the money was, and more importantly, what excited her. So, she started her own private chef business.
“When I started building my business here, my first big clients were Leonardo Dicaprio and Lenny Kravitz…They say fake it till you make it, right?” Mohajeri said, laughing as she reminisced. “Although I love cooking and although cooking is a passion of mine, I have always been very business minded, and I want to live a certain lifestyle.”
Mohajeri’s first clients were anything but conventional: Simon Cowell, the most famous judge to come out of America’s Got Talent, and Russell Wilson, one of America’s star quarterbacks. Not to mention Leonardo DiCaprio and Lenny Kravitz. So how did she do it?
“I always think to myself, what helps me get this job? Because it’s a ‘who’s who’ in LA and who have you worked for? Who have you cooked for?” Mohajeri explained. “Nobody cares–I mean, they care how good your food is–but it’s more about the name and how sought after you are because of who you’ve cooked for.”
Mohajeri’s wildly successful business and catering experience has not been her only taste of the culinary industry. Prior to moving to Los Angeles after culinary school, Mohajeri worked in New Orleans for a couple of years in restaurants such as Andrew’s Palace as a line cook, hoping to gain experience within the public culinary industry.
The restaurant industry lived up to its name–it was tough. Although, not too tough for Mohajeri. With a hard head and strong personality, Mohajeri only appeared to thrive in that environment. However, the history of the culinary industry has always favored men.
Dr. Alexandra Hendley, a professor of sociology at Murray State University explores gender inequality specifically within the culinary industry in her book Gender and Food: From Production to Consumption. Hendley states that “starting in the 18th and 19th centuries, male chefs (many of whom worked in royal or aristocratic households) sought to professionalize by distinguishing their work from feminine, domestic, or amateur cooking. Women were even excluded from early guilds and cooking schools” (Hendley 222). This belief of the “chef as masculine” has only prevailed in the current culinary industry, with only 22.8% of chefs and head cooks being women in 2021 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2022).
While I wanted to know more about Mohajeri’s business, I needed to understand her experience within the restaurant industry, as she explains it “shaped” her as a chef. Reminiscing on her two years in New Orleans, Mohajeri stated her treatment in the kitchen as a fact. She didn’t appear angry nor hurt; rather, her explanation almost seemed like it had been told thousands of times before.
“[The chefs] are just yelling, and they do it specifically to try to get you out of there because they don’t think you’re tough. They don’t think you can keep up with the other men. But I am my father’s daughter. I’m very hard headed and have an A-type personality. So to me, it was kind of like a game,” Mohajeri stated.
“A game.” After talking with so many chefs, I don’t know many who would describe the back-of-house environment as “a game.” Perhaps Mohajeri’s attitude is in part why she has made it this far and has become this successful in such a cutthroat industry. Or maybe it’s simply because of her food and work ethic. Regardless, Mohajeri now averages around half a million dollars a year through her private chef business and is well known within the private chef world. She has a commercial kitchen, five other chefs who work for her full time, and even a series of meal prep vending machines throughout Orange County.
“Maybe I had the look, maybe I was available, maybe I worked harder than somebody else. I always say, ‘I don’t know that I’m a better chef than the next guy, but I will probably outwork them,’” Mohajeri stated with a finalized tone.
Mohajeri’s restaurant days are far behind her now. Despite attending culinary school and working within almost all facets of the culinary industry, her status as a full time private chef is still somewhat questioned. Within the culinary industry, a sort of hierarchy prevails. Line cooks and other back-of-house staff, comprised of primarily immigrants, rarely get the recognition for the genius behind a dish. What’s more, in many sectors of the restaurant industry, private chefs are still not considered “real chefs” either. If it isn’t the person cooking the food, or a person creating a recipe, what constitutes a “real chef” remains the prevailing question.
“The restaurant chefs don’t consider private chefs to be ‘real’ chefs,” said Mohajeri. “As a line cook in a restaurant, you are cooking somebody else’s menu, and you’re doing the same thing over and over again. So you go in there, and nobody knows who you are, right? There’s no proper compensation, and then it’s the executive chef who puts his name on something, who’s getting like, ‘oh, he’s the great chef.’ Yeah, he wrote the menu and created the item, of course. But it’s the line cooks who are doing all the work. A private chef, in my opinion, is to be considered a true chef.”
It appears that Mohajeri has the answer. Or at least, the answer for her. The question of a “real chef” follows the culinary industry everywhere–both in the media and in reality. What’s more important is the impact this hierarchy has on chefs or aspiring chefs themselves. Hendley again explores this phenomenon, stating that “chefs experience status insecurity and have to constantly engage in boundary work to address who exactly is a chef and whose cooking should be valued” (Hendley 222).
The “value” of cooking is even a question itself–how is it measured? Measured by whom? Critics, the public, and fellow chefs themselves put their two cents into what is “good” and what isn’t, but the subjectivity of “good” is hardly something tangible. Who gets recognized and deserves praise appears to only count for a select group of people: white, male chefs in the public sector. Despite the harsh limitations a career as a chef sets in place, Mohajeri has entirely created a name for herself in Los Angeles.
“It’s a different world to be in, and it is a man’s world, like the very world of the chef’s industry is a man’s world,” Mohajeri exclaimed. “So to come here and kind of make a name for yourself, it’s not impossible, but it’s not easy.”
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