Home cooks look to professional chefs for help reorganizing overly cluttered kitchens

Originally published July 1, 2021 in The Post and Courier

By Hanna Raskin

When home kitchen owners bring in private chefs, they usually want them to fix a meal. But one Charleston-area chef has lately started fixing his clients’ kitchens.

“During the pandemic, especially at the beginning of it, we were home a lot more and dealing with all the different utensils back from when I’d gotten married, back from college,” Mount Pleasant attorney Gary Christmas said. “I was using a Corning dish to put steak in.”

Fed up with his culinary hodgepodge, Christmas called Ty Kotz to see if he could tell him “what I need to keep and what I need to kick.”

Christmas explained it’s common for lawyers to save time and money when getting ready for trial by hiring experts, so he figured he could apply the same strategy to his cooking setup. Kotz, a former New York City chef and cooking show contestant who had recently added organizational consulting to his professional repertoire, agreed to review Christmas’ inventory.

“There is so much junk out there and gadgets nobody needs to be a good cook,” Kotz said. “I like to come in and clear it out to what they need based on how they cook. I believe it truly helps people in a way no other service does.”

Kitchen assessments are still an emerging service category. While many private chefs will make over spice racks or pantries for a fee, it’s almost impossible to locate providers through online search engines. Even Kotz is still in the process of updating his website to reflect what he offers.

Yet it stands to reason that a growing number of home cooks will take a closer look at their kitchens in coming months. Although it’s still too early to codify post-pandemic behavior, Supermarket News in May reassured readers that research conducted by a Jacksonville marketing firm showed a sustained uptick in at-home meals.

Nearly 20 percent of respondents to Acosta’s survey said they intend to cook more meals than they did prior to COVID-19.

Leslie Lynch, who also arranged to have her kitchen collection culled, cooked before the pandemic. But now that she has an edited set of equipment, she feels like her earlier meal-making sessions amounted to little more than food preparation.

“You just totally take everything out of the kitchen, literally every single item, and decide what you really use,” Lynch said. “I got rid of things and added things that now I use every day.”

Although Lynch declined to detail what she ditched, Christmas said Kotz instructed him to get rid of “five or six different types of food processors and blenders” and replace them with one appliance that does the same job. He also nixed a giant pair of outdoor grilling tongs in favor of half-sized tongs which allow Christmas to flip steaks comfortably.

“It’s almost like an extension of your hand,” he said.

Among the additions to Christmas’ kitchen were a durable cutting board, extra pans for enhanced food safety and his favorite, a box of food-service plastic wrap.

“I was never a big leftovers guy, but now I can have leftovers for the kids,” he said. “And I like the minimalist clean lines.”

Kotz also included storage containers on Christmas’ shopping list, which consisted mostly of items in the $4 to $6 range. Christmas confessed he hasn’t used those much yet, since he doesn’t eat “a ton of cereal.”

But if he wants last night’s dinner for breakfast, he’s got the pork chop saved and the right knives to turn it into omelet filling.