26/09/2026
On a Friday in August 2005, Cristeta Comerford was told she would be the next White House executive chef, the first woman ever to hold the job, and that she had to keep it to herself until Monday.
She could tell her husband. Nobody else.
That was hard, she told NPR years later, because she is very close to her mom. "If I tell Mom, she's going to tell the whole Chicago area."
She was on vacation in Mexico that weekend. On Sunday afternoon she got back to her room, and the news was already out, a day early.
So she called her mother right away. Her mother was in tears.
Cris, as she is known, was 42. She had come to America at 23, and she had started at a hotel salad bar.
ONE OF ELEVEN IN SAMPALOC
She was born Cristeta Gomez Pasia on October 27, 1962, in Sampaloc, Manila.
Her father, Honesto, was a school administrator, and her mother was Erlinda. Cris was one of eleven children.
She went to Manila Science High School, then studied food technology at the University of the Philippines.
Then, at 23, she left the Philippines for America.
THE SALAD GIRL
Her first job in America was on the salad bar of a Sheraton hotel near O'Hare Airport in Chicago. Her older brother Juanito told the Washington Post that he called her "salad girl."
She also worked at a Hyatt Regency, and she spent six months cooking at a restaurant called Le Ciel in Vienna, Austria.
In Washington she cooked in the restaurants of two hotels, the Westin and the ANA.
THE ASSISTANT
In 1994 she got a temporary job helping in the White House kitchen for the state dinner for Nelson Mandela.
In 1995 the executive chef, Walter Scheib, hired her from the ANA as one of his assistant chefs. Bill Clinton was president.
She stayed his assistant for ten years. She says the advice Scheib gave every new cook was to leave your politics at the door, because the job is to make the family happy with their food.
In May 2003 the White House held a state dinner for Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Cris remembers that Scheib asked her to write the menu.
The guests chose lamb. She told NPR she remembers thinking, lamb for Filipinos? But that is what the guests wanted, so she made the lamb, with fava beans.
The salad had a calamansi dressing. Calamansi is our tiny, sour Philippine lime.
She told the Washington Post that the menu was "like a marriage of the two countries."
THE TRYOUT
In February 2005, Scheib left the job.
First Lady Laura Bush spent six months looking for his replacement, and hundreds of chefs applied. She tried out the finalists by having them cook real meals at the White House.
On July 18, 2005, Cris planned the menu for an official dinner for India's Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, and 134 guests. Chilled asparagus soup, pan-roasted halibut with ginger-carrot butter, basmati rice with pistachios and currants.
The Washington Post reported that her work that year, including that dinner, helped the First Lady make up her mind. That was the Friday news, and the weekend in Mexico.
On Sunday, August 14, 2005, Laura Bush made it official.
"Her passion for cooking can be tasted in every bite of her delicious creations," the First Lady said.
Scheib put it more simply: "She's a great chef who happens to be a woman."
And Evan Garcia, the deputy chief of mission at the Philippine Embassy, told the Washington Post, "Maybe she can start offering lumpias in the White House." Hold on to that one.
WHAT PRESIDENTS ACTUALLY EAT
This is my favorite part, because the White House kitchen turns out to be a lot like every other kitchen.
She says Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had the same favorite thing she made, enchiladas. Her secret is homemade tortillas. "Of course it has to be homemade."
She once made Barack Obama a fancy cheeseburger on a brioche bun she baked herself. He looked at it and told her he was fine with just the regular grocery-store bun.
I love that. All that French training, and the man wanted the soft bun from the supermarket.
The Obamas kept her on in 2009, and Michelle Obama's vegetable garden on the South Lawn became what Cris called the backbone of the menus.
On January 3, 2010, she was on Iron Chef America, teamed with Bobby Flay against Emeril Lagasse and Mario Batali, cooking with vegetables from that garden. She put lemongrass in a broccoli soup, and she and Flay won.
She told NPR that American food is like jazz. Every chef is classically trained, the way a pianist is. "But in America, we play jazz."
She meant that everyone who came here brought their own food, and it all got mixed into something new. She was one of the people who brought it.
THE FAMILY BEHIND HER
Her husband, John Comerford, is also a chef. She credits him with giving up his own career for their daughter, Danielle, while she ran the White House kitchen.
Danielle grew up to be a pastry chef.
TWENTY-NINE YEARS
She cooked for five presidents: Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden. The Associated Press counted 54 state dinners.
Her last one was in May 2024, for President William Ruto of Kenya.
In July 2024, after 29 years in that kitchen, she retired and moved to Florida.
"I always say, food is love," Jill Biden said when she left.
Years later, she told the Associated Press, "At the end of the day, when you do the family meals upstairs, they're just regular people at home."
LUMPIA AND ADOBO
Remember Evan Garcia and his lumpias.
On April 28, 2014, President Obama gave a toast at a state dinner in Malacañang Palace in Manila, a short drive from the neighborhood where Cris was born.
"There's one in particular I'm grateful for," he said, "Cris Comerford, our executive chef at the White House." The room applauded when he said she was born in Manila.
Then he added, "We in the White House enjoy the occasional lumpia and adobo." The room laughed.
Lumpia are our crispy spring rolls, and adobo is meat stewed in vinegar, soy sauce and garlic.
She told NPR that Obama already knew Filipino food from his years in Hawaii. So every now and then, she put the food of her own childhood on the White House grill, skewered pork, the kind sold on the street back home.
And in her telling, he would say, "Hey. That's smelling good right there."
A girl from Sampaloc, one of eleven, grilling pork on sticks for the President of the United States.
Source: White House transcript of President Obama's toast in Manila, April 28, 2014; NPR All Things Considered, September 10, 2024; Office of the First Lady, August 14, 2005; The Washington Post, 2003 and 2005; Associated Press, 2005, 2024 and 2025; GMA News, 2009 and 2024; ABC News, 2010 →
