When people think of a private chef, they picture a family home. A household kitchen, a family table, children and parents.
But there's a shift happening in Singapore that's less visible and, in its own way, just as interesting. Family offices and private offices — the discreet, high-performing teams that manage significant wealth and business interests — are increasingly bringing private chefs in-house to cook for their people every day.
We saw it again just this week. A new client, a private office in Asia Square, came to us looking for exactly this. A chef to prepare daily lunch and dinner for their team. Healthy food, specifically low-carb and high-protein. It was a service they'd wanted for a long time and simply couldn't find. When they found us, the relief was genuine — they'd finally found the thing they'd been looking for.
What these offices are actually tired of
The story behind this particular client is one we hear constantly, and it's worth telling because it's so common.
For years, they'd done what most Singapore offices do — ordered in. Food delivery for lunch, delivery again for those working late into the evening. And like a lot of people who rely on delivery day after day, they'd grown genuinely tired of it. Tired of the quality. Tired of the sameness. Tired of the fact that so much of what's easily available in Singapore, convenient as it is, simply isn't that healthy.
For a high-performing team, this matters more than it first appears. The people in these offices are making significant decisions all day. Their focus, energy, and clarity are the whole point. And there's a direct line between what a team eats at midday and how they perform through the afternoon. A heavy, carb-loaded delivery lunch produces exactly the kind of mid-afternoon slump that a demanding office can't afford.
They knew this. What they couldn't find was someone to solve it properly.
Why it's surprisingly hard to find this service
You'd think, in a city like Singapore, that hiring a chef to cook healthy daily meals for an office would be straightforward. In practice, it isn't.
Catering companies deliver in bulk, but that's not the same thing — it's the same food-delivery quality problem at a larger scale, food prepared hours earlier somewhere else and transported in. What these offices want is different: someone in-house, cooking fresh, on-site, tailored specifically to how their team wants to eat. Someone who can do genuinely healthy food well, day after day, without it becoming repetitive or joyless.
That's a specialised role, and the chefs who can do it well are not easy to find on your own. It needs someone with private chef sensibilities rather than volume-catering habits, real skill with healthy cooking specifically, and the temperament to work as a quiet, consistent presence within a professional environment.
This is exactly the gap Le Petit Marché exists to fill.
Matching the right chef to the right brief
For this Asia Square client, the brief was clear: low-carb, high-protein, genuinely healthy, cooked fresh for lunch and dinner every day.
That's not a brief you hand to just any chef. Healthy cooking at this level is its own discipline. Keeping food low-carb and high-protein while making it varied, satisfying, and something a team actually looks forward to every single day takes real expertise. Done badly, it's a fortnight of grilled chicken and sad salads before everyone quietly starts ordering delivery again. Done well, it's food people are genuinely happy to eat, that also happens to keep them sharp through the afternoon.
We matched them with a chef who specialises in exactly this — private cooking for health-focused individuals. Someone with deep experience making healthy food that doesn't feel like a compromise. For a client who'd been searching for this service for a long time without success, finding the right chef, properly matched to their specific needs, was the whole thing they'd been missing.
Why offices are choosing in-house chefs over the alternatives
The logic, once you see it, is quite compelling.
An in-house chef means the team eats well without anyone leaving the office or waiting on delivery. The food is fresh, made on-site, and tailored precisely to how they want to eat — down to specific dietary approaches like low-carb and high-protein. The quality is consistent because it's the same chef every day, learning the team's preferences and refining the food over time. And the productivity case is real: a team that's eating well at midday performs better through the afternoon than a team recovering from a heavy delivery lunch.
For a family office or private office where the people are the entire asset, investing in how well those people eat isn't an indulgence. It's a straightforward, sensible investment in performance and wellbeing.
How Le Petit Marché works with offices
The process mirrors how we work with families, adapted to a professional setting.
You tell us what your office needs — how many people, which meals, any specific dietary direction like the low-carb, high-protein brief we handled this week. We match you with a chef who genuinely specialises in that kind of cooking, not just anyone who's available. We handle the contracts properly and correctly, and we stay involved to make sure the placement works as well in month six as it did in week one.
If your office has been putting up with food delivery you're tired of, and you've been quietly wishing there were a better way, there is. We'd be glad to talk about what it would look like for your team.
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Le Petit Marché is Singapore's private chef concierge agency, founded by Chef Nicolas Reynard and Kai. We match families, family offices, and private offices with chefs we've trained, vetted, and genuinely stand behind.
