The up-and-coming healthy chef who cooks for Gwyneth

When Ariane Resnick decided to get back into cooking, after recovering from two major illnesses (naturally, she says, without ever taking a pill), she signed up as a private chef on the booking site Kitchit.

Before she knew it, Kitchit was collaborating with Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop and tapped her to cook up a healthy meal, with a million dietary restrictions, for the actress, the results of which were featured in the June 2013 edition of the newsletter.

Since then, Resnick has been a chef on the move, cooking for Paltrow in the Hamptons over the summer (and on an ongoing basis), where she also fed Paul McCartney, Cameron Diaz, Sarah Jessica Parker, Ethan Hawke, and Jay-Z, to name a few. She regularly preps in-house meals for media mogul Clive Ng, and she just launched her first cookbook devoted to the ever-popular bone broth.

And while she’s never had a moment of formal culinary training, she’s establishing herself as the go-to chef for a new era of healthy cooking in which dietary restrictions abound. Gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free, sugar-free? No problem, she says. “My niche now is that I can accommodate so many restrictions at once without people noticing,” she swears. “I’m doing healthy food that does not look or even taste healthy.”

Learning to cook (well)

Resnick says most of her healthy kitchen inspiration comes from growing up in a completely holistic household. “We didn’t have commercial food,” she says. “My mother made absolutely everything from scratch and ran a co-op out of our basement.”

When she was 19, she was hired as chef de cuisine at a vegetarian cafe, despite her lack of training and experience. “I was hired based on my ability to make chocolate cake out of garbanzo beans, which at the time was not common,” she says.

She later created raw packaged snack brand Rawk-n-Roll, and then licensed the brand to a larger manufacturer. All of this led up to her debut as a private chef, making a name for herself in the Beverly Hills kitchens of the detoxing Hollywood elite.

The future

As she builds her brand and following, Resnick is still playing the role of iconoclast, staying a few steps ahead of the other chefs attempting to cater to healthy eaters. “I don’t use gluten because so often someone is sensitive,” she says, for example. “That to me is just baseline.” Lately, she’s been intrigued by the Bulletproof Diet and has started adding grass-fed collagen (yes, collagen) to her morning smoothie, which also includes maca, MCT oil, and Chinese herbs.

And she’s of course constantly experimenting with recipes that eliminate the ingredients the wellness cognoscenti is rising up against. “The things I’m taking out are generally less healthy than the ones I’m putting in. For example, there is no one out there benefiting from white flour,” she says. “My basic tenet is just because you can put it in your body doesn’t mean you should.” —Lisa Elaine Held

For more information, visit www.arianecooks.com or check out The Bone Broth Miracle

(Photo: Ariane Resnick)

This article was updated on October 29, 2015.