Las Vegas chef equally at home in desert, at sea

“How do you do yachting in the desert?”

Romana Rovic, a private yacht chef, said she gets that question a lot living in Southern Nevada.

Rovic, the 52-year-old owner of Chef Romana LLC, spends about half of the year at sea and half of the year in southeast Las Vegas, where she has lived since 2004.

“I have an agent in Florida that gets me assignments, and I either accept it or not,” she said.

Rovic returned from an 18-month assignment last October during which she cooked for between eight and 25 people while sailing from Fort Lauderdale, Florida to Maine, and then all the way down to the Bahamas.

“I cooked for the (yacht) owner and the family and the crew, and then they would have parties every weekend,” Rovic said. “The last boat was a $14- or $15-million yacht, and I had what’s called a country kitchen. My island was granite and it’s about 10 feet by three of four feet. So it’s a rather large galley. Not everybody gets that, but fortunately most of the boats I’ve worked on have had that.”

Frequent dishes she made were crepes and Yorkshire pudding popovers.

“They were hot and crispy and would just melt in your mouth.”

Rovic returned from a three-month assignment in Long Island, New York, in mid-August, working as a private chef for the yacht owners both on their yacht and in their home, cooking for eight to 10 people.

“I’d cook for whoever would show up to their home or boat,” Rovic said, adding that sometimes she’d end up cooking for celebrities.

One of the most memorable dishes she made during that assignment was a roasted asparagus soup with dill, shaved black truffles, lemon oil and sprinkles of truffle cheese, garnished with brioche croutons.

Rovic said she is trying to live up to her favorite quote: Henry David Thoreau’s “live the life you’ve imagined.”

“I was in sales for years, this is my second career, and I’ve always wanted to incorporate the things that I’m passionate about, which is traveling, baking, cooking, writing, photography, boating, meeting people — all those things I thought to myself, ‘How do I have a job that incorporates all that?’” Rovic said. “And it just hit me one day when I saw an article in the paper about a yacht chef, and I thought, ‘Wait, I can do that.’”

She saw that Wall Street Journal article in 1990, and she clipped out the photo accompanying it and put it on her vision board.

In 2010, she made her vision into a reality by forming Chef Romana LLC. “I don’t think people fully realize what this position entails, there’s a lot to it,” she said. “There’s a lot going on on a boat. It’s a city on the water with a lot of different personalities — a lot of different neighborhoods.”

Working on a yacht, Rovic said she has to be “quick on the fly” and constantly adapt to change, coming up with new dishes, for example, when ingredients fall through or somebody needs something different than planned.

“It’s like life; just when you think you figured something out, it changes.” Working in the galley can be chaotic and busy. Rovic said when it gets crazy she keeps track of time based on meals.

“There were times I didn’t even know what year it was.”

In addition to being ready in the kitchen, Rovic also has to be ready to save a life in the case of an emergency. In order to enter a career in yachting, Rovic was trained and certified in delivering first aid, personal survival techniques and firefighting, among other qualifications.

“Sure you have to be able to cook, but saving a life comes first.”

Contact Nicole Raz at nraz@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4512. Follow @JournalistNikki on Twitter.