An egg-cellent way to make a living is to cook food for A-listers.
Celebrity chef Jeff Schroeter is dishing on the offbeat meals he’s prepared for celebrities including Madonna, Anna Wintour and the late Queen Elizabeth II.
Vogue editor Wintour, 73, would “go through different phases [of eating],” he recently revealed on the news.com.au podcast “I’ve Got News For You.”
During one such stage she would eat his “beautiful” tuna Niçoise salad that he claimed “everyone ate,” said the cook extraordinaire.
However, the fashion expert didn’t like fresh tuna, so her dish had to be made with canned fish — which she brought with her.
Wintour would hand her silver tin to a waiter, who would hand it off to a busboy, who then brought it to the kitchen.
“So I’d make this beautiful niçoise salad, and then open a tin of tuna and just put it on top. And she loved it,” explained Schroeter, who co-founded Sydney, Australia’s Beckett’s restaurant and worked in kitchens at London’s Savoy Hotel and the Royalton New York.
As for the Queen of Pop, 64, she hired Schroeter to work her high-security 37th birthday party several decades ago at the Delano Hotel in Miami.
The plate he made for the “Material Girl” — with help from three other chefs from around the country — was dubbed the “Madonna salmon.”
The meal, reportedly her “favorite dish,” was created with a specific type of salmon and was sliced in the shape of a butterfly.
Crushed cucumber, dates, walnuts, shaved fennel, lemon juice, olive oil and sweet basil topped off the entrée.
“It’s healthy, it’s good for you,” Schroeter said. “It was brilliant — three days down there and all I had to do was one dish. It was the best function I’ve had.”
He also recalled that he only “briefly” met Madonna but still said she was a “lovely, lovely woman.”
Another queen — Elizabeth, who died in September 2022 — would often stop by the Savoy for dessert.
He recounted how he instantly knew that a member of the royal family was in the vicinity when “heavily armed security guards [came] through the kitchens with Alsatians [German shepherds].”
However, he sensed that it was the famed monarch herself when a particular order came through.
“[The royals] always dine in one of the seven private banquet rooms, but we’d know it was the queen because she always loved the peach Melba – so we knew when there was seven to 10 peach Melbas going to a private room, the queen must be in the house,” Schroeter said.
One of the quirkier requests came from famed designer Karl Lagerfeld.
He once rolled up to Schroeter’s kitchen with about 10 to 12 people after a runway show for a particularly downscale meal — for which the staff was not prepared.
“An American hotdog with fries,” claimed Schroeter.
“The rest of the table – all fully suited, beautiful suits – they all went, ‘Yep, I’ll have one too.’ So that order comes down on the kitchen and we go, ‘We don’t have any of that!’”
Problem-solver Schroeter dispatched his staff to find a street vendor and buy a dozen wieners before they closed up shop at midnight.
As for obtaining crispy french fries, a busboy was sent to a local McDonald’s, which unsurprisingly held the solution to that problem.
“We put it on plates, sent it out, and [Lagerfeld] said it was the best meal [he’d had] for a long time,” Schroeter joked.
Credit: Source link
