The Rise of Private Chefs in Abuja

By Joy Adanu and Desmond Onyemechi Okocha

Food has been one of our basic necessities as humans, and over the years people who are busy with work and life often outsource cooking to others, buying food and soups in litres from local restaurants and subscribing to daily meal delivery.

By means of outsourcing, the concept of the private chef started, and people would pay professional chefs to cook in their homes.
Private chefs are becoming a big thing in Abuja and in Nigeria as a whole, and social media is a major reason why. In the past few months, a video went viral of a content creator who posted details of how her client paid for her flight from Lagos to Abuja just to cook chicken stew for him. Blogs reposted it, and one repost by @delsueye on TikTok alone pulled in more than 57,000 likes. Since then, TikTok, X, Facebook and Instagram have been full of “day in the life of a private chef” videos, where chefs film themselves cooking inside people’s homes, dressed in a certain manner and not the supposed chef uniforms.

This has turned the job into entertainment that many people now watch for fun.
Some of the clips are polished. A Lagos chef known on TikTok as @rikky filmed her working day for a popular CEO, and viewers hailed it as what a real private chef looks like. Dara Tiana (@tianaskitchen_) posted about a client family that supplied every ingredient she asked for, while @dgeneral_lee introduced “Chef Teni” and her smoky jollof. Others are pure comedy, like Private Chef Zeeee (@zeeeecooks), who posts skit style videos under the title.
Some videos blow up because of the drama in them. The online private chef community also started sharing chef price lists, showing rates for their services and exclusive chefs (offering happy endings). This made the service feel less like something only rich people can afford, so more people now want to try it. In May, the drama got real. On 3 May, a female private chef went viral in a clip shared on X by @ChuksEricE, saying three clients cancelled on her because she refused “happy ending” requests. Weeks later, on 29 May, @itzchristunique wrote that she and her sister had tried to book a Lagos private chef just to taste her food, and that the chef reacted strangely once she found out the clients were women. The chef later explained who her customers are, and social media split down the middle.
But all this attention has also caused arguments. Trained chefs with real cooking backgrounds are unhappy with people who call themselves private chefs online just to get views, even though they have no proper training or experience. The real chefs say this trend makes the job look easy, can mislead clients about skill and hygiene, and also makes the profession look like there is another motive behind it, because of the kind of content posted online. Most content creators make content mimicking and displaying how these private chefs behave when they are booked, and this has given the whole internet a different perspective from the cooking we all know. The loudest voice came from celebrity chef Tolani Tayo-Osikoya, known as Chef T. On 23 May she called the “private chef and nudity” trend painful to watch, noted that people who do the work diligently rarely go as viral, reminded everyone there is dignity in labour, and asked, “Can we stop?”
Some of the content creators, on the other hand, say they are just home cooks trying to build a community online and do not see anything wrong with it. There has also been talk about how certain female chefs get more attention for their looks than their cooking.
Even with the disagreement, the trend has helped the industry grow. Many chefs are using the attention to build their brand, get more bookings, and show people what being a real private chef actually involves. Maryam Saidu Ibrahim, known as Chef Maah, sells cooking tutorials and recipes through her platforms. The job market tells the same story of an Ikoyi household who  wants a discreet chef with at least four years of experience, and an Abuja restaurant chain is hiring a private cook for family meals. Nobody is advertising for views. They want skill, hygiene and trust.