8 Strict Rules White House Chefs Are Forced To Follow

The White House kitchen operates with a team of five chefs who are hired as full-time staff. Some First Families have brought their own chefs on, but the majority have worked for the house itself and typically serve numerous presidential administrations throughout their tenure. Headed by an executive chef and an executive pastry chef, this staff works in a 900-square-foot kitchen on the ground floor of the White House, and sometimes requires the outside aid of additional sous chefs who help with larger events, planning special holiday treats, and perfecting and plating the menus for elaborate state dinners. 

While much of the chefs' time is occupied with executing grand government events many months in advance, taking the opportunity to practice some gastrodiplomacy, their day-to-day in the kitchen also entails preparing meals for the First Family. Working in such close proximity to the Chief of State, daily life in the kitchen comes with many complex protocols, as well as a few quirks — security clearance is mandatory, odd hours are inevitable, and grocery shopping is a highly coordinated, secret affair. While many aspects of daily life on the job remain undisclosed, most of the known rules defining White House chefs' roles have important reasons behind them, and all of them speak to the unique nature of this important culinary profession. Here are 8 strict rules all White House chefs are forced to follow. 

What sets the White House kitchen apart from other culinary operations is that chefs are expected to indulge any craving the President might have at any given moment of the day. They also must adapt to cooking foods to the First Family's tastes, which differ with each administration. Gerald Ford liked to keep butter pecan ice cream on hand for dessert, while Jimmy Carter typically requested Southern fare for the main course. Among the Presidents with eccentric eating habits, Ronald Reagan typically had a dish of jelly beans to munch on in the Oval Office. One of Richard Nixon's go-to snacks was cottage cheese topped with ketchup — he claimed the condiment added better flavor to something he only ate for his health. President Obama also had an unusual request that re-established a precedent at the White House. He asked his chefs to get into home brewing, using a kit he bought himself, so they could take part in an old presidential tradition of homemade alcohol.

Beyond go-to favorites, some presidents have had an aversion to certain foods, namely vegetables. Donald Trump likes fast food so much that chefs have had to devise their own clandestine vegetable fries to encourage a more health-conscious bent to his meals. George H.W. Bush went even further. He essentially banned Brussels sprouts from the White House and considered broccoli the enemy. His declaration, as reported by the LA Times, was, "Just as Poland had a rebellion against totalitarianism, I am rebelling against broccoli." 

Though they aren't paid overtime, White House chefs are technically expected to be ready to work at any given moment. Part of this requirement is to cater to presidential whims, but former White House executive pastry chef Bill Yosses revealed in an interview with Huffington Post that odd-hour requests were actually quite rare. Furthermore, there was a practical reason behind being constantly on call. In addition to serving the President, the White House kitchen has to be ready to feed hungry workers, to fuel them through important state affairs that could come up at any time of day. "In theory, we were working 24/7. There could be a national emergency and the people involved have to get up at 3 a.m. and handle a crisis," Yosses recounted, elaborating, "The crises happened, but they weren't hungry."

Even if they aren't typically employed at all hours, White House food services can and have been summoned by the press of a button. There are a few of these positioned throughout the White House. They alert the kitchen and prompt a fast response — someone appears in the room a few minutes later, carrying whatever was requested on a silver tray. President Trump has been known to scare Oval Office invitees with one such button marked with a presidential seal kept at his desk. Rather than setting off a nuclear detonation as most unknowing guests might fear, the button would simply summon someone in with a Diet Coke.

Management of the White House kitchen and its staff falls under the jurisdiction of the First Lady. While most of the kitchen staff remain full-time employees of the White House, serving each new administration as new First Families move in, the First Lady does possess the power to hire and fire executive chefs. First Lady Laura Bush employed this right when, finding the cooking unsatisfactory, she let Walter Scheib go, and hired his sous chef, Cristeta Comerford, to fill the role of executive chef in his place.

The First Lady also works closely with White House chefs to plan menus, typically a weekly occurrence, and the collaboration ranges from daily meals to elaborate state dinners. Sometimes the expectations have been extravagant. First Lady Nancy Reagan was known to have a highly specific idea of what was well done, and was not one to give out compliments. Roland Meisner, executive pastry chef for the Reagans, had three dessert ideas rejected for a state dinner for the Queen of the Netherlands. The First Lady finally decided on an elaborate presentation of sugar baskets decorated with hand-crafted sugar tulips two days before the date of the event. In describing the time crunch for the New York Times, Meisner recounted the First Lady's unconcerned instructions, "'Roland, you have two days and two nights,' and I said, 'Thank you, Madam.' It was another test, and you know it makes you strong. Mrs. Reagan pushed me to be who I became."

There has been much speculation over whether the White House employs official tasters to prevent food-related attacks on the President's safety. While the New York Times may have mentioned them as part of Bush's administration in a 2001 article, former executive chef Walter Scheib, who was running the White House kitchen at the time, later revealed that the role of official Presidential taster does not exist at the White House. In a 2013 interview with the Washingtonian Scheib explained that all the chefs employed in the kitchen have top security clearance, officially called "top secret presidential proximity clearance," which means they have been screened and are free to work unsupervised.

The security of the White House kitchen also assures that visiting heads of state do not need to send tasters into the kitchen either. "Nothing gets to the President that hasn't fallen under somebody's jurisdiction," Scheib said, "If the President is just grabbing a pretzel randomly at the table, it's been screened." As for when the President dines out, there is someone who monitors the restaurant kitchen, though the details of what this entails remain under wraps. What is common knowledge, though, is that to keep the White House a secure facility, there are very strict policies that forbid all outside food. This applies to all staff and visiting chefs — all ingredients must be sourced by the White House and prepared on-site to avoid any risks and ensure maximum safety.

While the White House kitchen is in charge of family meals and special event catering, it's not typically this team of chefs that provides meals for the President while he's working in the Oval Office. Instead, the President's lunch is usually provided by top-tier military chefs, often from the Navy, who run an on-site cafeteria in the West Wing Basement known as the Navy Mess. While this 50-person dining space next to the Situation Room is certainly open to the President, there's also a separate place for dining in the suite of rooms adjoining the Oval Office, which is much more practical for working lunches. The President often takes midday meals in this Oval Office Dining Room.

As for why this midday culinary obligation is the Navy's responsibility, the tradition goes back quite a few years. Navy stewards have been providing food service to the President since 1880, under the Hayes administration. Typically, the Navy would prepare meals while the President was at sea, especially aboard Presidential yachts. Bringing naval food services ashore, however, dates back to the Roosevelt administration. FDR established the Presidential Retreat in Frederick County, Maryland in 1942, today known as Camp David, and requested Navy Stewards serve meals on site. The official Navy Mess was added to the White House in 1951, during the Truman administration, which paralleled the creation of the Presidential Food Service, an official part of the U.S. Navy.

Groceries come directly out of the first family's budget, and grocery shopping for the White House is a daily occurrence. There are official grocery shoppers who go out to buy all foods and they rotate the grocery stores they frequent, so as to avoid drawing attention to themselves. Since White House pantry space is not unlimited, grocery lists always keep the First Family's food preferences in mind, and the White House kitchen makes a point of stocking the family's favorite foods. But sometimes Presidential favorites have not been the easiest to source. The Clintons. for instance, occasionally had a hankering for a Southern brand of pickled watermelon rind that could only be found in one specific store.

While grocery shopping is a daily necessity for the bustling White House, much of the kitchen's produce actually comes from an on-site White House kitchen garden, which has blossomed into a thriving growing space in a corner of the South Lawn since First Lady Michelle Obama created it in 2009. The garden provides seasonal produce for the First Family and White House guests, and revives a tradition of homegrown fruits and veggies on the White House grounds. Gardens have bolstered White House cooking for numerous administrations, since the time of John Adams' presidency. Around 1800, he requested a growing plot. Also notable was First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt's Victory Garden, kept in solidarity with the home front initiative to supplement rationing and combat food shortages during World War II. 

State dinners, held for visiting monarchs and heads of state, are the occasions that put the most pressure on White House chefs, both in the lead-up to the event and during the highly curated timing of the dinners themselves. Preparation for these events can take up to six months and involve planning down to the finest detail. Chefs typically work with the First Lady to prepare several tastings for potential menus, usually designed to reflect the flavor profiles of visiting cultures. They must also take into account any cultural dietary restrictions — not serving certain meats, for example.

State dinners are drawn-out affairs that last for an average of four hours, during which everything is timed to the minute in order to proceed seamlessly. Consequently, there are a fair number of rules to dictate the flow of events. As a general rule, second helpings are never offered to diners, but are available if a guest requests to have more. The strictest rule for chefs driving these events, however, pertains to the rhythm of serving courses. Each one lasts for precisely 55 minutes before it's time to move on to the next. While this poses a challenge working under time constraints, kitchen staff can't really afford to hurry things either, due to the fact that they're serving courses on priceless White House china. To keep everything running smoothly, chefs must be efficient but not rushed.

Part of White House chefs' role also includes preparing food for holiday events. While these occasions may be lower stakes than state dinners for visiting dignitaries, they're still executed on a large scale and require a great deal of preparation. When Presidents have hosted Hanuka celebrations, these holiday events have demanded a lot of forethought, requiring rabbis to survey the White House kitchen and undertake extensive cleaning procedures to ensure proper kosher protocols for meal preparation.

One of the most elaborate edible holiday creations from the kitchen is the annual holiday gingerbread house — with gingerbread being an age-old tradition in itself. The White House pastry chef is tasked with designing and executing this oeuvre, but often requires assistance from other chefs in the kitchen. This is a tradition that dates back to the 1960s, under the Nixon administration, and requires weeks of preparation to assemble the gingerbread into an elaborate architectural feat. Taking on various forms over the years, the design sometimes comes out as a gingerbread model of the White House itself. 

Come springtime, Easter is another annual celebration that puts extra demand on the kitchen, particularly for the White House Easter Egg Roll. The occasion invites children to the South Lawn to compete in rolling dyed, hardboiled eggs as far as they can before they crack. The kitchen is typically in charge of preparing these eggs, boiling and hand-dying about 30,000 each year.