Diablo Gazette • JANUARY 2016 • Page 3 • www.DiabloGazette.com | www.fb.com/DiabloGazette • (925)-298-9990
Popular Walnut Creek Private Chef Service May Be Best in California There’s a lifestyle trend rapidly growing these days, private chefs. Walnut Creek’s Sean Andrade is a Certified Master chef and owner of AWG Private Chefs. He and Certified Master Chef/Patissier Mike Ryan are two of only seven master chefs in all of California, both are working at AWG. No wonder the business is thriving. This was Sean’s passion from childhood. Sean Andrade first started his culinary beginnings at the early age of 4 years old, sitting on the kitchen counter, helping his mother tear lettuce for a salad, or stir a sauce on the stove, in his parents home in Walnut Creek. His mother raised him by the “no son of mine isn’t going to know how to cook, clean, do their own laundry, and take care of themselves …” “I think the best gift that my mom ever gave me was the essential life skills of cooking, and not just ‘throw together cooking,’ but she actually taught me the basics of how to eat healthy, well balanced meals, that were not only good for me, but also tasty as well.” By age 11, Sean was preparing most of the family meals and helping his
parents with the grocery shopping, meal planning and preparation. His love for cooking never died. And his parents encouraged him to follow his dream to become a chef. Growing up, Sean worked in a myriad of restaurants from pizza to fine dining and everything in between, always starting at the bottom and working his way up from the dishwasher, to prep cook, to line cook, to sous chef, and finally earned his Executive Chef title in 2001. A graduate of Walnut Creek’s Northgate High School, Sean earned his next title “Certified Master Chef,” a title currently held
only by six other chefs in California this summer at Accademia Cucina di Pandolfini Culinary Academy in Florence, Italy. “Going for the Masters was something that I had only dreamed of, and certainly I never thought I was good enough to make it.” Thirty days of intense training, sometimes 18 hours a day, on your feet can really put you through the ringer, but it was all worth it in the end. The only way to be a great chef, is to pour your entire being into your food, to give every ounce to your guests, because they are the ones that you work for, not the restaurant, not the boss, the people who are eating your food, they are the ones that deserve nothing but the best! AWG Private Chefs is a Walnut Creek based private chef service, specializing in fully customized inhome dining experiences, tailored to exactly what the client desires. “When you cook for someone in their home, it is a very intimate thing, you are cooking exactly what they want, down to the smallest detail, and they take that first bite, and the smile goes across their face, that is what being a
private chef is all about. When I work with a client to design a menu for them, I want to make sure that they understand that the dining experience we will embark on together is one that is all about them. Once Chef Sean and his client decide on a menu that fits, he gets to work on sourcing the ingredients for the meal. I pride myself on using locally sourced, organic, GMO free, and sustainable ingredients from small family owned farms right here in the Bay Area, in my cooking. The chef then arrives to the clients’ home 2-3 hours prior to their desired dining time, and prepares the meal fresh in their home kitchen. “We shop, we cook, we serve, and the best part, we even do the dishes and clean up the kitchen when we are all through” providing a full service dining experience is what AWG Private Chefs is all about. In January, AWG Private Chefs announced freshly prepared meal delivery service as a part of their fully customized dining choices. Now our clients that are always on the go, can have healthy meals, prepared fresh daily in our commercial kitchen, and delivered to them same day. I love to pamper our clients’ palates by insuring that each meal has their favorite flavors, paying special attention to dietary concerns, food allergies, and lifestyle choices such as gluten-free, paleo or low-carb. See their ad left.