What a private chef in Tuscany actually is
A private chef in Tuscany cooks in the kitchen of the house you have rented rather than in a restaurant, and the booking covers the whole meal: shopping at the morning markets, cooking on site, serving at your table and leaving the kitchen clean afterwards. Group sizes usually run from two to twenty guests, and bookings range from a single arrival dinner to several evenings spread across a villa week. This is a different service from catering, which feeds eighty or more people at one seating with a brigade and hired equipment: a private chef works alone or with one assistant, and the meal runs at the pace of the table because there is no service window and no second sitting to clear for. Menus are agreed in advance but stay flexible until close to the date, since Tuscan produce changes substantially between May and October, and dietary restrictions shape the menu rather than producing one separate plate.
What an evening with a private chef involves
I arrive with the shopping already done (from the markets I actually use, not a supermarket on the way), and cook in your kitchen. Depending on what you want, that is a relaxed four courses on the terrace or something closer to a tasting menu. You are not managing anything: no shopping, no timings, no washing up afterwards.
The menu is agreed in advance but stays flexible until close to the day, because the best thing at the market in July is not the best thing in October. If someone in the party has a restriction, it shapes the menu rather than producing a sad separate plate.
What it is like having me in the house
The part people are quietest about when they enquire: it is your holiday house, and a stranger is about to cook in it. So, plainly. I arrive two to three hours before you want to eat, with the shopping done and most of the prep already finished. Your kitchen is not a building site while you are having a drink, and the cooking that happens in front of you is the last and best part of it.
During dinner I am there when the table needs something and out of the way when it does not. Nobody has to make conversation with the chef. If you want each course explained I will explain it; if you would rather forget there is a chef in the house, plenty of evenings run exactly that way.
Discretion is part of the job. I do not photograph your table, your house or your guests without asking, and I do not post them.
When it is over the kitchen goes back the way I found it: pans, surfaces, bins, all of it. You should walk in the next morning and see no evidence that dinner happened, apart from what is in the fridge.
A single dinner, or the whole week
Most enquiries are for one evening: an arrival dinner, a birthday, the night everybody is finally in the same place. Some are for a full week, where I cook every second evening and leave you a filled fridge in between, which tends to work better than cooking every single night.
Groups have run from a couple to twenty. Beyond that it becomes an event rather than a dinner, and the private events page is the better starting point.
Good to know
- ·I need to know what your kitchen has: oven, hob, fridge space. Send a photo if you are unsure; villa listings are optimistic.
- ·Wine can be handled by you or by me. If you would like pairings from the estates around Montespertoli, say so.
- ·Renting through an agency or managing the villa yourself? See villas & hotels for partner arrangements.
- ·Want to cook rather than be cooked for? That is the cooking class.
- ·Nothing here is a set menu on a set night. Tell me the evenings you want me and the ones you would rather have to yourselves, and we build the week around that.
Working out what to book
Three questions come up before almost every booking, and they are answered properly in the villa dining guide rather than skimmed here: what a private chef actually costs and which factors move that number, how a villa week really runs day by day, and whether a chef, a caterer or a cooking class is the right thing for your group at all.
The short version: the number of evenings you want cooked moves the price far more than the number of people at the table, and most families end up happier booking three dinners across a week than seven.
