About Juan
The story of Juan Bernardini
Thirty years of cooking, from his grandparents' house in Azul to the tables of Buenos Aires. This is how he became the private chef behind every dinner.
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The story
Juan grew up in Azul, a town in the interior of Buenos Aires province, in the kitchen of his grandmother Blanche and his grandfather José — the place where, long before it had the name of a trade, he started chopping, peeling, tasting and helping with every step of a family meal. On Sundays the same curiosity followed him to the other side of the family, to the kitchen of his paternal grandfather, Don Jorge.
Finishing high school did not come easily — he admits he liked playing more than studying — but he did it with one fixed goal: enrolling in the international chef program. He still remembers the trip to Tandil to pick up his first chef's jacket, three months before classes started, just for the pleasure of wearing it.
His first years in the trade — which he tells from his first job in a kitchen, a cold garage in Azul making churros and Berliner doughnuts, and from his pre-dawn shifts as a baker's apprentice — were spent in restaurants. Then he decided to take the leap and work for himself as a private chef at home: bringing restaurant cooking to the table of each client's house, with no middlemen and no one else's apron. Alongside it, he built up years of consulting for restaurants, putting that same chef's-table eye at the service of other people's kitchens.
That change of course coincided with the internet reaching the trade — his own website, his first campaigns, clients who found him on Google instead of through word of mouth. The leap worked so well that in 2017 it was recorded in the press as a success story (see below). Thirty years after his first steps in a kitchen — the ones he tells in most detail in the plum tart he baked with his grandmother and in the story of the three people who made him a cook — he is today a private chef at home in Buenos Aires, and he still cooks every service himself: in gated communities, in high-rise apartments, for law firms and boards that value discretion as much as the menu. (Those stories are in Spanish — his own words; any browser will translate them.)
What he cooks
Juan cooks Argentine cocina de autor — chef's cooking: restaurant technique applied to seasonal produce, designed to be served and eaten at a home table, not in a dining room. Every menu is built with the client — there is no fixed menu — but the foundation is always the one he learned as a kid: good ingredients, no shortcuts, and a fair amount of affection in every step. That same cooking is what he puts together for a romantic dinner at home or an Argentine asado with the chef at the grill — the menu changes, the hand does not.
He tells the story of his grandmother Blanche's rice dish himself, the one the grandchildren waited for on every visit: it had no recipe name, it wasn't called risotto or paella, and its secret, according to Juan, was simple — “she made it with a lot, but a lot, of love.” Thirty years of professional cooking later, he says he tries to do the same with every plate that leaves his kitchen.
In the press
In 2017, El Cronista — one of Argentina's main business dailies — used Juan as a digital success story in a piece on small businesses and the web: the chef who went from “word of mouth” to “click to click.”
— El Cronista, February 23, 2017 (“La Web, la vidriera en la que hay que estar” — “The web, the shop window you have to be in”) · read the original (Spanish)
The article tells it in numbers: with an initial investment of about $100 in online advertising, Juan landed his first private client in under 24 hours. It was the turning point that took him out of other people's restaurant kitchens and into private-chef work full time — the same trade that, almost a decade later, is still his everyday job. He has also been featured in La Nación and Clarín, Argentina's two largest newspapers.
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In pictures
Questions visitors ask
Does Juan speak English?
Juan works mostly in Spanish; menus and WhatsApp messages can be handled in English without any problem, and the food needs no translation. If you prefer, write to him in English and he will answer.
Where does he cook?
Throughout the city of Buenos Aires and the surrounding area — apartments, houses, country clubs and offices. He arrives with the ingredients, cooks in your kitchen, serves, and leaves it clean.
How do I book?
By WhatsApp: tell him the occasion, the date, how many guests and the neighborhood. He builds the menu with you personally and confirms the date.
Write to Juan directly
Tell him what you're celebrating and where in Buenos Aires. He builds the menu with you, personally.