What Being a Luxury Private Chef Taught Eloise Thompson about Advertising

Before I started my career in ad-land, I was chopping carrots, sautéing onions and sous vide-ing beef (you better believe it was a blinking good beef ragu). Working as a private chef in France (ooo la la) taught me far more about advertising than I ever thought possible.

I never thought a debate on whether a piece of broccoli looks soggy would come back to haunt me in the world of advertising, but alas, I have debated many times about how soggy countless vegetables look, not to mention whether the shine on the cutlery is up to standard or if the lighting ‘feels right’!

It’s been six years since my days in the kitchen, but there are three key lessons I have taken away from chef-life and applied to advertising.

Number One: Chin up, clients won’t always like the work. 

You and your team will spend hours and hours creating something beautiful, innovative, artful, (some may say ingenious) all to be told ‘it’s just not right’ and you just need to ‘persevere sweetheart’. Often clients don’t know why. In chef land, maybe it was the fact the Beurre Blanc wasn’t pale enough, which translates in ad-world to ‘the colour grade on that edit isn’t working’. Maybe it just doesn’t feel ‘on-brand’ enough (even though it’s totally on brand). Even as a chef I was once told that cheese fondue ‘just isn’t on-brand for me, can you make me some Moule Mariniere’. Sometimes though, clients will take the leap, they will try the Coquilles Saint-Jacques even though they aren’t sure about shellfish, or go with the script that’s a bit naughty but will get them noticed. And when they do, I want to give them a big fat kiss and say ‘thank you for trusting us’.

Number Two: Budget’s will always be a debate.  

Oh budget, budget, budget. Across my time as a chef and my time as a suit, I faced the typical question of ‘and will that cost me more to do?’ And my answer of ‘yes because it wasn’t part of the original request’ being met with ‘but why?’. As a chef I used to be able to delegate the negotiating task to my bookings manager, she was brilliant at explaining that we can’t just serve lunch up a mountain out of a helicopter without being paid to do so. However as an account director, I have had to take a leaf out of her book and sit down to explain how ‘zis jus doesn’t come for free, we ‘re a bizness’ (I don’t do the French accent though, don’t worry). I have found that 90% of the time, if you can explain the intricacies of the kitchen (or agency) and how our processes work, clients usually come around.

Number Three: Trusting each other is vital.

Your relationship with your client, albeit in a kitchen or an agency is nothing if they don’t trust you. ‘Are you sure that flavour combination will work?’. Yes, trust me. Try it and you will only experience deliciousness. The same goes with the creative, the money and the ways of working. If your client trusts you and your work to build that relationship, the process of working with them is made so much easier. Failing that, the other thing you could do is just get really drunk with them. I once got so drunk before a dinner shift with some clients that I fell asleep sitting next to the fridge, and a very friendly (and equally drunk) client of mine wandered into the kitchen looking for a snack and found me. She gave me a glass of water and the encouraging words of ‘we can sober up together’ gave me the confidence to do the evening's dinner service (you better believe the vegetables were the soggiest they had ever been, that evening). She and I bonded after that. She’d covered for me, and once I’d seen her throw up in a champagne bucket (twice), we had each other's back. That’s how client relationships should be in our industry too. Clients should feel confident in the work you have done, to take it to their stakeholders and push it through, because together you have built a relationship based on trust (and not just alcohol).

Working in a client servicing industry can be hard. You pour everything you have into the work and sometimes it doesn’t go the way you want. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t thank my lucky stars every day, that I get to work with fun, like-minded and strong-spirited people, all who live for the joy of making things - because believe me, most of us chefs, are moody as F.