Before moving to New York City in 2013, Cintia Diaz didn’t have any professional culinary experience on her resume. At home in the Dominican Republic, she’d cooked for her family, but she was a stranger to the restaurant business.
In New York, that quickly changed. Diaz took on various restaurant roles over the years, from server and bartender to maître d’ and host.
“I wanted to learn more about every single role in the industry,” she tells CNBC Make It.
Today, the 33-year-old has experience from two more roles under her belt; she’s now a private chef and culinary educator.
Cintia Diaz, a private chef living in New York City, offers meal prep and private dinner services.
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In 2025, she made roughly $66,220 in gross income.
“At the moment, my business is in a very good place, and I’m happy where it’s heading,” she says.
From fine dining to home kitchens
Following her string of restaurant jobs in her first few years in New York, Diaz pivoted into fine dining around 2017 and subsequently pursued a bachelor’s degree in hospitality management.
Her goal at the time was to one day work in leadership, managing restaurants. But after a few years in the restaurant business, she wanted a healthier work-life balance and felt being a private chef would offer her that. To become one, she went back to school for an associate’s degree in culinary arts to get hands-on training in the kitchen.
“Being a chef allows you to explore what balanced meals are, how to eat healthier, how to share the knowledge with others,” Diaz says. “I’ve always been very curious about how the body reacts with the different meals and how we feed the body. Food is medicine.”
Cintia Diaz left the restaurant industry to become a private chef, which she says gives her greater work-life balance.
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Diaz began working as a private chef in 2021. She offers meal prep services as well as private dinners. Today, she averages four to five meal prep clients per week and two to three private dinners per month, she says. She gets clients from referrals and booking platforms like Solette and Take a Chef.
Besides being a private chef, Diaz also teaches cooking classes for children at local schools through a culinary education organization. It comes naturally to her, she notes, as her parents are both teachers.
“I like working with the kids; I like to teach,” she says. “I grew up around that, and that’s something that I really enjoy.”
Besides being a private chef, Cintia Diaz also teaches culinary classes for kids.
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‘I really enjoy the freedom’
For a meal prep client, Diaz will usually dish up four to five days’ worth of food at a time. She works with each client to create a menu and decide how many meals and which meals of the day to prepare.
“My focus is based on what the client needs, the requirements, the preferences, the culture, the lifestyle,” she says. “Different clients have different preferences and needs with their family.”
Diaz either orders groceries online ahead of her visit to the client’s home or heads to the supermarket before cooking. After preparing, labeling and storing the meals, she cleans the kitchen and stays in touch with them until her next service.
Cintia Diaz either goes grocery shopping before a service at a client’s home or orders groceries delivered in advance of her visit.
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One perk of being a private chef is having “more direct contact with the person that I’m cooking for,” Diaz says. Another is flexibility: When she worked in restaurants, she was juggling two to three jobs alongside her college classes; school and work together took 50 to 60 hours a week then, she estimates. Today, Diaz says she works 20 to 25 hours a week.
“I really enjoy the freedom of being able to build my own lifestyle, my own schedule and being able to be creative in my workplace,” she says. “There are weeks or months that I decide to have an easier schedule. There are other times that I decided to work a little bit more.”
But, there can be a “lack of consistency” in being a private chef.
“Sometimes there are weeks that you can have a full week, but maybe the following week is going to be a little bit slower,” Diaz says.
‘The same income that I would have working in a restaurant’
Diaz’s meal prep pricing ranges from $250 to $450 per service, excluding groceries, depending on how much food she’s preparing and for how many people, as well as how labor-intensive the menu is. For private dinners, she charges between $110 and $300. Diaz makes between $90 to $275 per culinary class.
Because she primarily uses clients’ kitchen supplies, her main business expenses are her $56 monthly phone bill and $34 weekly public transit card.
“I think you can live comfortably in New York City with the amount of money that I make as a private chef,” she says.
Cintia Diaz says she makes “the same income” she would have working in a restaurant while working much less, around 20 to 25 hours a week.
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Diaz lives with her boyfriend and says splitting living expenses helps stretch her money further.
“I don’t think it’s in my plans to work as a restaurant chef,” she says. “I have the flexibility in my schedule and the freedom to work in the ranges that I want with the hours that I want with the same income that I would have working in a restaurant.”
At home in her own kitchen, Diaz still cooks and meal preps for her boyfriend and herself on the weekends, usually making Dominican food. Doing it for work too hasn’t taken away her love of cooking.
“It’s like my mini science project where I can tweak things, create things, and if it doesn’t work, I just try it again until it works,” she says. “It’s very beautiful that you’re creating something with your own hands, and the results are something that you can really enjoy.”
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