Meet Your Match: 3 Personal Chefs, 3 Ways to Dine at Home
Hiring a personal chef used to mean one thing: a special-occasion splurge. In Burlington, it now covers a lot more ground…weeknight dinners packed into your fridge, a hands-on pasta class for a friend's milestone birthday, a full restaurant experience delivered to your dining room table.
Three local chefs are working this space, and each has built something distinct. We've gotten to know all three through Burlington Wine & Food, and each brings real talent and professionalism to their work. Here's who they are, what they do best, and how to pick the right one for your needs...
Gather Round Chef Service: The Team Built for Weeknights
Ariel Voorhees of Gather Round Chef Service spent 14 years teaching while managing a long commute and raising young children. She knows the weeknight scramble firsthand, and she built Gather Round to solve it: a team of chefs cooking custom, family-sized meals that land in your fridge or freezer, ready to heat and serve.
The core offerings are the Effortless Weeknights Plan (three or four meals cooked in your home each week) and the Pack the Freezer Plan (five meals once a month, ideal for new parents, post-surgery recovery, or anyone in a busy stretch of life). They also cater dinner parties and Vermont vacation rentals for groups up to fifteen.
What also sets Gather Round apart is the roster. Voorhees has assembled a small team including Katie Hlavacek, trained as a Natural Foods Chef with a background in therapeutic and holistic cooking; Ashley Cyr, a New England Culinary Institute grad with allergen-safety certification; and Raya Foldi, who's worked her way through Burlington kitchens including May Day and Majestic. That range means Gather Round can flex across serious dietary restrictions, picky kids, and mixed-diet households.
From this stellar team, Gather Round matches each client with their own personal chef who gets to know their dietary needs, learns their kitchen, and cooks directly in their home on an ongoing basis. They serve Burlington plus the Route 100 corridor from Stowe to Warren.
Cooking with Stephanie: The Teacher Behind the Apron
Stephanie Gurrieri of Cooking with Stephanie didn't start in food. She earned a Public Relations degree from Champlain College, then found herself pulled toward cooking...reading food blogs, hosting dinner parties, visiting farms. She left that career for the Natural Gourmet Institute in New York, then came back to Vermont because, as she puts it, it kept pulling her home.
Her business centers on teaching. Small-group cooking classes — fresh pasta, charcuterie building, roast chicken fundamentals, small plates with cocktail pairings — happen in a client's home and are built for connection as much as skill.
Alongside the classes, she caters small weddings, rehearsal dinners, and private events with Vermont-forward, seasonal menus.
Where Gather Round removes you from the kitchen, Stephanie puts you in it. Her signature format is participatory: gather your people, roll up your sleeves, and leave with a skill along with a full stomach. That makes her a natural fit for a milestone celebration, a bachelorette weekend, or a corporate team-building night…occasions where the cooking itself is part of the entertainment, not just a means to dinner.
Wine and Dine Vermont: A Full Restaurant Experience, At Home
Chef Matt Stewart spent ten years as a Boston EMT before he ever picked up a chef's knife professionally. He started at the Salty Pig in 2017 and moved through some of Boston's most respected kitchens (SRV, Coppa, Toro) before ending up at Hen of the Wood in Burlington and eventually striking out on his own with Wine and Dine Vermont. When he's not cooking in someone's home, you'll find him in the kitchen at Onion City Chicken & Oyster.
That path through fine-dining kitchens shows up in how he runs a private dinner: restaurant-level technique and pacing, all brought into your home.
His business is built around the private catered dinner, typically for groups of two to twenty, paired with a curated wine list built alongside his clients. He also teaches cooking classes for groups of six to ten (pasta making, knife skills, pickling) and, for bigger events, brings a full staff of servers and bartenders so the evening runs like a restaurant service from first course to last.
As a side note…we've hired Matt twice for small dinner parties at our house (six to eight people both times), and both nights were excellent, with restaurant-caliber food and none of the stress of hosting (or cleaning up). We also connected him with a friend planning a 50th birthday celebration for a small group of women that included a pasta-making class; the feedback afterward was glowing. One thing that distinguishes Wine and Dine Vermont is the wine program built into the experience from the start, and the option to scale all the way up to full front-of-house service.
So Which One Do You Book?
If you need dinner on the table every night (plus leftovers) without touching a pan, Gather Round's fridge- and freezer-packing plans easily solve that. If the point of the evening is the cooking itself — a class, a group activity, a celebration where everyone leaves with a new skill — Stephanie's hands-on format is built for that. And if you want a restaurant-level dinner party with wine pairings and full service, without having to leave your dining room, that's Matt's territory.
All three are based in the Burlington area, all three cook seasonally and locally, and all three came to this work by way of a completely different first career…teaching, PR, emergency medicine. Three different paths, three different ways to eat well with little effort on your part…the only real question is which one best fits your table.
