Matthew H. Gladstone

Matthew Gladstone cooked his way through three decades of extraordinary American life , not in restaurants or on television, but inside the private world of the very wealthy, the very famous, and the occasionally very difficult.

Starting with a tiny catering operation he built from scratch in San Diego’s North County into one of the largest production companies in the region, he worked his way to Los Angeles, where a boutique hotel on Rodeo Drive led him to the Jackson family. For nearly four years, he was private chef to Katherine Jackson and her grandchildren in Calabasas, cooking collard greens and grits, arguing Sinatra versus Dean Martin, and navigating a household that functioned, in his words, like a zoo with valet parking.

From there he cooked for Kobe Bryant, the Getty family, legendary venture capitalist Raymond Frankel, Joe Walsh, Adam Levine, and a long roster of billionaires and captains of industry whose stories fill his memoir.

After two decades in Los Angeles, Gladstone moved east, eventually landing in Maryland where he ran a commercial kitchen feeding nearly a hundred corporate employees daily while cooking private dinners for the family upstairs.

He retired from private service in 2026 and turned his attention to writing , something he’d been doing in his head for thirty years.

His debut memoir, I’m Not High Maintenance, As Long As Everything’s Perfect: A Chef’s Diary — Thirty Years of Cooking, Kitchens & Chaos, is exactly what the title promises: eighty-five pages of unfiltered, profane, and surprisingly tender stories from a life spent inside other people’s extraordinary households.

His literary novel, The Price of Proximity: A Novel of a Private Household, takes the emotional truth of that same world — the ache of being trusted, indispensable, and never quite included , and transforms it into fiction in the tradition of The Remains of the Day.