It all started with an over-medium egg—or, in Kyle Ripple’s case, a poorly cooked one.
Back in 2015, having recently graduated from high school, Ripple was staying at his family’s Jupiter condo with no real career plans—except to work on finding one. One morning while having breakfast at Another Broken Egg in Harbourside Place, he struck up a conversation with the restaurant’s chef, who invited Ripple back to the kitchen for an impromptu culinary test. His assignment? Cook an over-medium egg.
“I totally messed it up,” recalls Ripple, whose only restaurant experience prior to the over-medium egg episode was bussing at Guanabanas as well as a restaurant in Ohio, where he grew up. “The chef even said, ‘I don’t know if this is going to work.’” After breakfast, he drove straight to Publix and bought several egg cartons to practice making over-medium eggs at home.
Preparing meals may not have come easily to Ripple, but he had two important traits going for him: passion and a strong work ethic. “Where I come from in northeast Ohio, it’s
a steel town, and hard work is part of who we are there,” he says. “I just brought that to
Jupiter.” Within a few days, he returned to the same restaurant and cooked a perfect over-medium egg—and he was hired.
Over the years, Ripple cut his culinary teeth in the kitchens at Lynora’s, Dive Bar, Food Shack, and Leftovers Café, working his way up from sous chef to head chef. “I was enamored with what I was doing,” he says. “I would work a 14-hour shift and come home to figure out how I could get better.”
Sometime in 2020, Ripple felt the itch to leave the restaurant business and become a private chef. Colleagues in the field raved over their ability to travel with clients and the freedom they had to plan meals. A friend who worked as a physiotherapist for PGA golfers recommended Ripple to serve as personal chef to golfer Victor Perez during the entirety of the U.S. Open that year, and after just one week, Ripple was hooked. “When I left that tournament, I told myself, ‘This is what I want to do,’” he says.
Today, Ripple prepares and plans meals for big-name athletes including golfer Dustin Johnson and his family and MLB pitcher Jack Flaherty. For Ripple, the upsides to being a private chef have few boundaries. “With restaurants, it’s cooking food for a bunch of people, most of whom you’ll never talk to,” he says. “But as a private chef, I get to know people and cook meals that impact them on a daily basis. It’s a lot more rewarding.”
His work as a private chef also led to a new business. In 2023, Ripple partnered with Mark Tailby to launch Ripples in Motion, a chef-placement agency that connects private chefs with individuals and organizations. Today, Ripples in Motion boasts a network of 160 private chefs who work with families as well as in-house at high-end developments.
Ripple and Tailby have recently expanded the company, adding chef-curated meal-prep services and wine tastings to their menu of services. With meal-prep service, the client and chef work with a nutritionist to determine an optimal meal plan that is tailored to the client’s needs. Chefs can prepare meals at the resident’s home or cook them in their commercial kitchen and deliver them already made. At the wine tastings, clients have the chance to converse directly with an advanced sommelier, Cynthia Betancourt, who shares the history of the wineries that produce the varietals and educates guests on things like flavor profiles and grape characteristics.
Ripple has come a long way from that kid who couldn’t cook an over-medium egg just 10 years ago. And he couldn’t be happier with how his professional life has panned out.
“Being a private chef is so rewarding,” he says. “I get to meet people, get to really know them, and cook meals that impact them on a daily basis…. It goes to show that if you put your mind to something, you can accomplish anything.”
Story by Nila Do Simon
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