Today we’d like to introduce you to Michelle Van Hees.
Hi Michelle, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
QUESTION 1:
I grew up in Spokane, Washington and I spent a lot of time with both sets of grandparents. My grandmothers were very good cooks and I was always hanging out in the kitchen. I remember sitting on the counter while Grandma Betty was rolling out pie dough, and I kept eating the scraps. She’d tell me not to eat the dough because I’d get worms, but I kept eating it anyway. I just liked being in the kitchen. My grandma van Hees had a farm and produce store and my grandpa Pyette was a hunter and fisherman so I was surrounded by fabulous food from a young age.
When I was twelve, my mom and I moved to Bellevue, Washington. The food in Spokane in the late ’70s and early ‘80s was pretty pedestrian. We’d go out for Chinese food and order sweet and sour pork, almond chicken, fried rice, and the family dinner specials. My mom wanted us to step outside that box and experience different cultures through food. We went to a British restaurant and she fell in love with Yorkshire pudding. We tried dim sum for the first time, which honestly scared me the first time and I had no idea what to do. She was always encouraging me to try something new and step out of my comfort zone.
During this period, she took me to a restaurant called Benjamin’s. It was at the top of a bank building, and it was the fanciest restaurant I’d ever been to. We got all dressed up, and I still remember walking in. There were white linen tablecloths and napkins, crystal, china, candles, and everything sparkled. The servers wore black pants, crisp white shirts, black ties, and bistro aprons. It was the fanciest thing I had ever experienced and it felt like heaven.
I ordered Chicken Oscar, and that was the first time I tasted béarnaise sauce. It changed my world. I couldn’t get over the flavors and the velvety texture, and I must have driven our waiter crazy asking him questions. I wanted to know what was in it, how the chef made it, why it tasted like that. I wanted to know everything I could about that sauce.
Not long after that, my mom took me to a bookstore, and I came home with a Sunset cookbook called Country French Cooking. I still have it today and I just started cooking. I began with the béarnaise and quickly moved my way through the book. I’d always loved cooking and I’d cooked dinner for my mom when I was ten making her Swiss steak along with an unholy mess, but it was that béarnaise sauce that changed everything. At twelve years old, I knew this was what I wanted to do.
I went to culinary school in my early twenties. I didn’t have any restaurant experience and felt like a bit of an imposter at first. I had been sowing my oats and having a good time before that trying to figure out my path. I loved culinary school and wanted my hands in everything. In Garde Manger class when they asked who wanted to learn to sculpt ice, my hand shot up like a rocket.
One of my chef instructors had worked on boats in Alaska and we got to discussing avenues beyond heading to the line after graduation. I loved travel and the idea of cooking on a boat sounded like so much fun. I decided that working on private yachts was where I wanted to be. Up until then, my boating experience was fishing with my grandpa in his sixteen-foot Bayliner. It certainly wasn’t a yacht, but I started researching how to do this and it was a friend of my Bayliner owning grandpa who gave him the number for LaCasse Maritime, a crew agency in the Seattle area.
I graduated at the top of my class, and two weeks later I interviewed for a job on Sensei, a 124-foot motor yacht. They were in La Paz for the season and looking for a chef. I had no idea that interview, over the phone while I was still standing there in my robe early one morning, would completely change the direction of my life.
For the next three years I worked on sailboats and motor yachts, traveling from the northern tip of Vancouver Island all the way down the West Coast through Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and the Panama Canal. From there I went to the Caribbean, up the East Coast, and eventually to the Mediterranean. It was incredible. I wasn’t just traveling. I was studying food everywhere I went, trying local dishes, meeting people, and experiencing different cultures through their food. For a little girl who grew up in Spokane eating almond chicken and ordering the family dinner specials at the local Chinese restaurant, it was transforming. It completely opened up my world and my eyes to humanity in so many beautiful ways.
After a few years, it was time to get back on land. It was one of those right place, right time moments. I contacted an agency in Palm Springs, and Bob Hope was looking for an executive chef. I interviewed for the position, then went to their home in Toluca Lake and cooked an audition dinner. I was hired, and I spent the next seven years as their executive chef.
It was an incredible experience. I cooked for President and Mrs. Ford, Rosemary Clooney, Phyllis Diller, monsignors, cardinals, and so many more wonderful and iconic people. Phyllis Diller was exactly as funny as you’d imagine. She was one of my favorites. I remember Cardinal McCarrick applauding my pancakes one morning and Rosemary Clooney breaking the bar chair, but not spilling a drop of her martini. Those years taught me so much, not just about cooking, but about hospitality, professionalism, and taking care of people at the highest level. Everything was silver service at all times.
Eventually I made my way back to the Pacific Northwest, where I went to work for Harold and Arlene Schnitzer. That job took my life in a completely different direction. I started as their chef and house manager, but as time went on the role grew and altered significantly. After Mr. Schnitzer passed away, I became Mrs. Schnitzer’s companion and personal assistant, and we traveled all over together taking me out of the kitchen, so to speak, and into the world of art, silver serving pieces, china designed by artists, jewelry and philanthropy.
It introduced me to an entirely different realm of existence. I was working with incredible china, silver, and crystal, and learning a level of service that very few people ever get to experience. I combined everything I’d learned with the Hopes, the butler service, the silver service, and all of the food knowledge I’d gathered while traveling the world on yachts. I absolutely loved it. I loved creating beautiful meals, anticipating people’s needs, and making every experience feel effortless for the guests. Finding pieces along the way to add to her collection and weave into a possible event.
At the same time, though, my personal life was spiraling. I poured everything I had into my career, and when I wasn’t working, I was drinking. By the end of 2015, I was in a really bad place. The Schnitzers knew it, and they loved me enough to help me find a path that ultimately saved my life. The thing that stands out to me now is that, on paper, I had everything. I had the job of my dreams, traveling the world, going to Paris for Van Cleef & Arpels’ spring collection gala week. Flying to Tokyo for a weeks celebration of the Rose Gardens with Kengo Kuma. We were having dinner at the Château de Chambord with painted elephants, fireworks, and everything you could possibly imagine. It should have been the moment where I thought, “Look where all of your hard work has taken you.” Instead, I was miserable. My passion for cooking, for anything was gone. I didn’t want anything to do with food, with travel, with helping my boss. I just wanted the job to be over so I could be left alone.
The Schnitzers stepped in and helped me get the help I needed. I began working a recovery program, but it took time to become honest enough and desperate enough to really do the work, admit defeat and sit all the way down. At forty-seven years old, I started over. Emotionally, financially, spiritually, I had made a mess of my life. I got a job at a retirement community working in the dining room kitchen, making sandwiches and soups and just trying to figure out how to be human again. Looking back, I didn’t realize it then, but starting over was one of the greatest gifts I was ever given.
I was there when COVID hit, and in an odd way, it was a blessing. The people in that retirement community still needed to eat, so I couldn’t stay home. I had to go to work every day. Toward the end of that first year, though, I got COVID. I lost my sense of taste and smell for roughly a year and a half, and I honestly thought everything was over. I thought, “I’ve already destroyed my life. Now I’m making sandwiches, and I can’t even taste food anymore.” It was devastating and I had no idea what was going to happen, but I didn’t drink.
What I discovered during that time was that my skill set hadn’t gone anywhere. I could still cook. I trusted the people around me to taste everything, and they told me it was right. I realized that cooking wasn’t just about tasting every bite. It was muscle memory. It was years of experience. It was the gift God gave me, the same gift I recognized when I was twelve years old sitting in Benjamin’s tasting béarnaise sauce for the first time. The gift I thought my heart had closed to forever.
That’s when I started asking myself, “What’s my next chapter? Where do I go from here?” I knew I didn’t want to stay where I was forever. I wanted to bring everything I’d learned over the years, my love of food, my passion for service, everything I’d experienced traveling the world and working in private homes, to people here in Portland and that’s how The Boutique Chef was born.
I jumped on Wix and built my own website. My very first client was a meal prep client named Zephyr, and she stayed with me for about a year. God bless that girl and all of her food issues. She was amazing, and without realizing it, she helped me build the confidence to believe I could actually do this.
After that I booked a Christmas party, then another event, and eventually I got my first dinner party for someone I didn’t know. In the beginning, most of your clients are people you already know or people who know someone you know, so getting a call from a complete stranger felt like a big deal. He hired me to cook for his birthday in February. He was kind of grumpy because COVID had happened, he’d gone through a divorce, and now he was facing his sixtieth birthday. We put together a wonderful dinner, and by the end of the evening he wasn’t grumpy anymore. That client called me again for the Fourth of July that same year, and I’ve been cooking for him every Fourth of July since. Every year it’s a joy to pull into his driveway because it reminds me where this all started.
When I look back now, I realize The Boutique Chef wasn’t created because I wanted to own a business. It was created through pain, desperation, hope, and joy. Every part of my journey, from my grandmothers’ kitchens in Spokane, to yachts, to Bob Hope, to the Schnitzers, to recovery, to making sandwiches in a retirement community, led me here. Today I get to create experiences around the table that bring people together, and I can’t imagine doing anything else.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I’ve had struggles along the way. For a long time, one of the biggest was imposter syndrome. I didn’t work in restaurants while I was growing up or through culinary school. I didn’t have that traditional background that so many chefs have, so there was always a part of me that wondered if I really belonged. Even as my career grew, even while I was cooking for dignitaries, icons, and incredible families, and receiving wonderful feedback, there was still that voice in my head that questioned whether I was good enough.
Looking back, I think that’s one of the reasons alcohol became such a big part of my life. It quieted that discomfort and helped me hide the feeling that I didn’t belong. The real struggle wasn’t my career. It was alcoholism. Trying to keep that hidden while continuing to perform at a very high level was exhausting, and those years were some of the darkest of my life.
Recovery has been a painful process, but also the most rewarding one. It’s like peeling back the layers of an onion and slowly discovering who you really are underneath. I’ve had to learn to trust myself, trust other people, and build an entirely different way of living. One of the hardest parts was that I completely lost my joy for cooking. I never wanted to cook again. During those couple of years, before I was really grounded in recovery, I even tried starting a business that had nothing to do with food because I thought I needed to reinvent myself. I was miserable.
Eventually, I had to go back to work because I had too. My debt was overwhelming, and I needed a paycheck. Going from being the executive chef for Bob Hope and later Harold and Arlene Schnitzer to making sandwiches and soup in the café of a retirement community for nineteen dollars an hour was a tremendous ego check. Looking back now, though, I can honestly say it was one of the greatest gifts of my life. It was during that time that I rediscovered who I was. My love of food came back. My passion came back. The joy of creating something for another person came back. Cooking stopped being just a career and became something much deeper. It became a way to be of service.
Because of the path I’ve walked, I don’t take this work for granted anymore. There’s a scene in the movie Big Night where a woman takes a bite of food, throws her head back, and lets out this incredible sigh because what she’s tasting is so wonderful. That’s the moment I chase. That’s what I hope every client experiences. I’ve seen what the depths of despair can look like, and now I get to create moments of joy around a table. To me, that’s what this work is really about.
We’ve been impressed with The Boutique Chef, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
The Boutique Chef is technically a catering company, but I really think of myself as a private chef first and foremost. What I bring to the table is curated catering. I create an entire experience so my clients can be the guests of honor at their own party instead of worrying about all the details.
When a potential client contacts me, we start with a conversation. I want to know their vision, their dreams for the event, the foods they love, the foods they don’t, and the little details that will make it personal. If it’s a bachelorette party, how can I tie the menu into the wedding? If it’s a rehearsal dinner, how do we make it feel like the beginning of the celebration? Every event is different because every client is different.
From the moment guests arrive, I want them to step into an experience. Maybe it begins with a signature cocktail and a welcoming bite, especially if they’ve spent the day wine tasting and need a little something before dinner. I set beautiful tables with flowers, candles, chargers, linens, and printed menu cards so every guest has a keepsake from the evening. It’s about creating an atmosphere where people can relax, be present, and simply enjoy each other.
The food is part of that story. We might start with a beautifully curated charcuterie display and simple passed hors d’oeuvres, or we might serve caviar with blini and butter-poached lobster in pastry shells. Whatever the menu, every course is thoughtfully connected to the one before it and the one after it. I want the entire meal to feel harmonious from beginning to end.
We’re incredibly fortunate to live in the Pacific Northwest, where we have access to extraordinary produce, seafood, shellfish, mushrooms, and game. I love showcasing those ingredients while creating meals that feel elegant, personal, and memorable. More than anything, I create experiences. Sharing a meal has never been just about putting food on the table. It’s about breaking bread with family, friends, and community. It’s about creating memories that people will still be talking about years later.
My ideal clients are people who love food, love gathering the people they care about, and understand that some of life’s best moments happen around the table. My job is to take care of everything so they can be fully present with the people they love. I don’t take myself too seriously, but I take what I do very seriously. If I can give someone an evening where they forget about everything happening in the world for a few hours and simply enjoy being together, then I’ve done exactly what I set out to do.
So, before we go, how can our readers or others connect or collaborate with you? How can they support you?
I love working with people who are celebrating life’s milestones. They’re looking for something special. They don’t want a cookie-cutter catering menu where they’re handed Option A, Option B, or Option C and asked to choose a starch and a protein. They want something that reflects who they are and creates an experience their guests will remember.
Many of my clients want to host an event in their home, but they also want to be the guest of honor instead of spending the evening worrying about the details. Whether it’s a wedding, a rehearsal dinner, a baby shower, a milestone birthday, a business celebration, or simply bringing family and friends together around the table, I work closely with each client to create an event that feels personal, thoughtful, and uniquely theirs.
If you’re looking to host something special, something memorable, and something created just for you, I’d love to start with a conversation. The best events always begin by getting to know the people we’re celebrating, and from there we can create an experience that your guests will be talking about long after the last course is served.
Contact Info:
- Website: Website: www.theboutiquechef.com
- Instagram: Instagram: @theboutiquechefpdx
