Here’s What Really Happens Inside The White House Kitchen – And The Bizarre Rules Chefs Must Obey

Just like the doctors in the ER, a White House cook must be available at pretty much every hour of the day. Former pastry chef Bill Yosses confirmed as much in February 2020. He told HuffPost, “In theory, we were working 24/7.” And even though you’re probably imagining the president tucking into a midnight feast in his pajamas, there are actually more official reasons for this.

Yosses, who worked in the White House from 2006 to 2014, went on to explain why the chefs have to be available all of the time. “There could be a national emergency, and the people involved have to get up at 3:00 a.m. and handle a crisis.” So, while these top White House employees may not be hungry then, the kitchen staff have to be prepared just in case.

It seems that one kitchen just isn’t enough in the White House. Instead, there are three. First, you have the principal kitchen. Then there’s another that’s dedicated solely to making pastry, desserts and sweet treats. Plus, the First Family also have a place where they can prepare and cook their own food. After all, everyone enjoys a spot of baking every now and again, don’t they?

Presidents can order pretty much whatever food they want – even if it is a tad weird. Take Richard Nixon, for instance, who used to ask for cottage cheese slathered in ketchup. He ate the dairy product because he thought that it was good for him, you see, but apparently wasn’t partial to how it tasted. And George Bush used to request a dish that’s even more unhealthy: cheeseburger pizza. Yep, that’s exactly what it sounds like: a burger and cheese on top of a pizza base. He obviously wasn’t counting the calories.

Meanwhile, according to former chef Roland Mesnier’s 2007 memoir, All the Presidents’ Pastries, Bill Clinton enjoyed an “atrocious concoction of Coca-Cola-flavored jelly served with black glacé cherries.” But even this is nothing compared to what presidents of yore liked to eat. James Garfield, for one, enjoyed squirrel stew, which would have been normal back then but is pretty unheard of now.

It’s the First Lady who hires the executive chef of the White House – not the president. That means they can fire them at will, too. In 2005 then-First Lady Laura Bush dismissed her head chef Walter Scheib after he’d worked at the White House for 11 years. And, of course, that news inevitably made headlines.

First Ladies also get to make the rules about their husbands’ eating habits. In October 2019 former pastry chef Roland Mesnier told ABC7’s Victoria Sanchez, “President Reagan loved chocolate, but Mrs. Reagan told me never to give him chocolate.” That didn’t stop Mesnier from quietly slipping some of the sweet stuff to the president, though.

In 2020 HuffPost interviewed a few of the former White House kitchen staff. And it was revealed that team members tend either to be from a more traditional restaurant background or from the military. Bill Yosses elaborated on which part of the army the cooks are likely to have come from, too. He said, “The military chefs are often Navy/Coast Guard, but there are also a few from the Army and Air Force.” Yosses added, “They’re very much unsung heroes in America.”

One ex-military guy is Andre Rush, whose photo went viral after he was spotted flashing his massive biceps while cooking meat. “Chef Rush has become a little meme now. It’s hilarious. I get a kick out of them,” the man himself told Food & Wine magazine in 2019. His nickname in the kitchens? Tiny, of course.

State dinners at the White House are very, very important events. They take place when another head of state visits America, after all, and so a grand meal is put on as a welcoming gesture. If anything goes wrong, then, it could be a diplomatic disaster. And needless to say, the staff in the kitchen are put under a lot of pressure to get everything spot on.

The First Lady picks out a meal that consists of at least four courses, and it’s up to the chefs to cook it to perfection. Apparently, they’re under a strict time limit throughout the whole event, too, as all courses must be served in under an hour from start to finish. “The dinners are a lot of pressure. We can have ten people doing one little course,” Rush told HuffPost in 2020.

Despite having to endure long working hours and stressful functions, the executive chef at the White House isn’t actually paid all that much. Sure, you get the prestige, but the cash earned doesn’t really stretch to cover the extra hours of work. And with that in mind, the job isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In fact, after Laura Bush fired Walter Scheib, The New York Times reported that she was having difficulty replacing him. Apparently, it was all down to the salary on offer.

But the position was filled in August 2005 by Cristeta Comerford, the first-ever woman to hold the job of executive chef. While reporting on her appointment, The New York Times pointed out that salary issue again, explaining, “The pay – $80,000 to $100,000 a year with no overtime – for what is essentially a private family chef who occasionally has an opportunity to show off at a state dinner is well below what top-level chefs can earn on the outside.”

In 2011 Barack Obama became the first-ever sitting president to make beer at the White House. And, yes, these were the brewskis he then handed out to people while on the campaign trail. Obama’s partner in this presidential micro-brewery was Sam Kass, a one-time White House chef and senior adviser for nutrition policy. Kass gave an interview to Smithsonian, too, shedding light on why the president had decided to take part in such a hobby.

Speaking in 2017, Kass said, “There’s been a transformation in beer culture over the last 15 years. Not only are there thousands of small breweries popping up all over the country, but people are [also] brewing beer in their basements all over the place. And I just thought it would be great to join in that sort of great American tradition — or a budding tradition, anyway — and brew some of our own beer.”

The lucky folks who have seen inside the Oval Office will probably have noticed the little red button that sits on the main desk. Contrary to popular belief, though, this doesn’t launch a nuclear attack. Luckily, there are a few rather more complex steps to go through before that ever happens. It’s instead for the much more pleasant task of summoning food and drink. Phew!

And thanks to billionaire Richard Branson, we all now know how Obama made use of this button. In his 2017 book Losing My Virginity, Branson recalled, “I noticed the red buttons on [the president’s] desk. Obama saw me looking at them. He said, ‘They used to be there for emergencies, but now I use them for ordering tea for my guests.’”

Ever since 1972, the White House chefs have had to create a gingerbread house at Christmas time. And pastry chef Susan Morrison spoke about this to Oprah Winfrey’s magazine O in 2016. “I spend all year thinking about the White House gingerbread house, but we don’t begin baking until November,” she said.

Morrison went on, “Then, for about four days after Thanksgiving, we work tirelessly to build the house before moving it to the State Dining Room, where more than 60,000 guests will cycle through. And it has to look as perfect as it did on day one — which means it can’t melt, it can’t be affected by humidity and it can’t be touched!”

Before Cristeta Comerford became executive chef, she was the White House assistant chef. Oddly enough, though, she wasn’t allowed to talk to the media about her potential promotion. So, when Comerford’s name was in the hat for the top job in 2005, The New York Times struck out when it attempted to get a quote from her. She simply told the newspaper, “You know the rules of the house.”

After her appointment, though, Comerford became more forthcoming in interviews. She’s opened up about her role, has detailed some of her most memorable experiences in the kitchen and has even shared some of her favorite recipes. So, it seems that the hiring process is just one system the White House would rather keep under wraps – and no, not the tortilla kind.

Obviously, it’s pretty vital that the White House chefs are subject to security checks. Walter Scheib explained it all to Vice magazine in 2015. “The clearance that you have when you’re working in the White House is called Top Secret Presidential Proximity,” he said. “The ‘presidential proximity’ part means that you can be in close physical contact with the president and the First Family with no Secret Service around you.”

Scheib went on, “In terms of the few of us that are in the kitchen who have that clearance, if you think about it, we’re not just around outside and next to the president; we’re physically inside of him. You really couldn’t get any closer to that. In a way, you may be one of the singularly most trusted people in the whole country.”

January 20 is always the day when the current U.S. president moves out to allow a new one to assume office. And as you would imagine, it’s an incredibly chaotic time for the White House chefs – all the household staff, for that matter. Until midday, they bring food and drink to the existing president. But after that, it all changes. They have a mere six hours to clean out the kitchen and rearrange it according to the new First Family’s wishes.

President George H.W. Bush famously hated one vegetable. “I do not like broccoli,” he announced to U.S. News and World Report in 1990. “And I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. I’m President of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!”

The message, then, was quite clear: no one was to serve Bush broccoli in either the White House or on Air Force One. And that wasn’t all he refused. In a 2011 C-SPAN show called Conversation with White House Chefs, former staff member Pierre Chambrin remembered, “I served [Bush] some Brussels sprouts. And he told the butler, ‘Tell Pierre never to serve that to me again.’”

The White House doesn’t advertise for jobs in the traditional way. If you want to work as a chef in the kitchen, then, you’d better know someone on the inside. And in some cases, White House employees have passed their skills down to their own children who then take up the job themselves. It’s true what they say: it’s not what you know but who you know.

Still, if you’re really lucky, there’s a chance you could be head-hunted. Henry Haller, who was the executive chef at the White House from 1966 to 1987, was hand-picked by President Lyndon B. Johnson himself. In 2015 his wife, Carol, told the AUI Fine Foods website what it was like at the time. “There was a security clearance after [Henry] was hired. We saw guys in black suits walking around the neighborhood asking questions about us,” she said.

Chef Susan Morrison didn’t actually apply for her job, either. In 2016 she told O, “In 1995 I was working at the Ritz-Carlton, Tysons Corner, in McLean, Virginia, when I was called in to meet with the White House’s then-executive pastry chef. He was looking for a contractor but refused to learn about candidates from their résumé. He put me to work for two days.” She succeeded and rose up the ranks.

Martin Mongiello was a White House executive chef for almost 30 years, and in May 2019 he spoke to the radio news magazine show WGLT’s Sound Ideas about what happened when dignitaries from abroad arrived to see the president. He said that in those cases, the menu would be “half American food and half from the visiting country.” Sounds clever, right? But it also seems like it can be a bit of a puzzle...

Mongiello went on, “You have to be able to control your minds and your hands. You’re cooking for Muslim special requests, you have kosher meals that need to be served that night. You may have any different number of a dozen different kinds of diets. It’s a bit challenging in that regard, but there certainly isn’t any room for attitude.”

One of the most entertaining dates in the White House social calendar is the Easter Egg Roll. Kids are invited to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to take part in various activities, including a race where they push Easter eggs along with spoons. Who’s responsible for making all those eggs? The kitchen staff, of course.

The chefs of the White House kitchen have to boil and dye more than 14,000 eggs for the day. By hand! It’s hard work — but at least it keeps the children happy. The Easter Egg Roll’s considered a very exciting occasion for the people who attend, and the high demand for places means that lotteries to get tickets only stay open for three days.

Former White House chef Walter Scheib has had plenty to say about the safety of White House food over the years. In 2013, not long after a rumor arose about President Obama having a person taste his food for him, Stein firmly told Washingtonian magazine, “There is no presidential food taster.”

Scheib went on, “Nothing gets to the president that hasn’t fallen under somebody’s jurisdiction. If the president is just grabbing a pretzel randomly at the table, it’s been screened.” To the best of his knowledge, foreign dignitaries also didn’t employ food tasters, Scheib said. And that’s because the White House was a “secure facility.”

During the Prohibition era, alcohol was naturally very hard to get your hands on. Unless, of course, you happened to be the president. The 29th leader of the United States, Warren G. Harding, actually voted in favor of Prohibition, but that didn’t stop him from throwing booze-fueled wild parties in the White House. It’s alright for some!

The White House staff who were around at the time witnessed Harding happily knocking back liquor at a time when practically no one else could. But there probably wasn’t a lot they could say about it. There was a loophole in the law, anyway. It wasn’t illegal to drink alcohol, just to make, sell or transport it.

A lot of food goes through the White House kitchens, but it’s the president and his family who shell out for it. Yes, ever since the 19th century and President John Adams, the occupants of the White House must buy their own meals. It’s only for official government functions that the taxpayer has to contribute.

Michelle Obama spoke about this while on Jimmy Kimmel Live in November 2018. She joked that while the White House staff would happily bring her whatever exotic fruit she requested, they didn’t mention the price. “Then you get the bill for a peach, and you're like, ‘That was a $500 peach!’” she laughed.

But while the chefs’ role is important, the 420 people who work for the current White House administration are perhaps more crucial to the running of the country. And their pay seems to reflect that increased responsibility. Excluding the president and vice-president, these 40 people are among the highest-paid employees of the White House right now, according to official data from June 2019. And spoiler alert: the top three all share the same first name.