Private Chef Chicago, explained in one page
No origin story and no founder’s letter. Here is the shape of the listing, the numbers behind it, and one thing about the photographs that is worth saying out loud.
Everything, in one table
- Started
- Chicago, 2018
- Chefs listed
- Three, every one trading under their own name
- Kitchens
- Caribbean & Soul · Italian · Pan-Asian
- Ground covered
- City, North Shore, west suburbs, and around the lake into Michigan
- Menus on file
- 37 of them, priced from $85 to $253 per guest
- Median price
- $175 per guest across all 37 menus
- Guest ratings
- 4.8 stars over 85 reviewed evenings
- Notice needed
- A fortnight most weeks, a month around the holidays
- In the number
- The menu, the shopping, the cooking, the serving, the clearing
- How you book
- Straight to the chef you picked. Nobody assigns you one
Why it exists
Search for a private chef in this city and you land on a Reddit thread, three Instagram accounts and a contact form. Three of the chefs behind those accounts are collected here instead, ordered the only way that matters when you are hungry: by what they cook.
Nobody here allocates you a chef, and nothing is standardised from one kitchen to the next. You read the menus and the reviews, you settle on one name, and the rest of the arrangement happens between the two of you.
Two further Chicago chefs ranked high enough on local bookings to belong here and are not listed. Neither had a photograph this site could publish — one portrait is 213 pixels square, the other is a press-wall shot with three other companies’ logos behind it — and putting a stock portrait of a stranger on a real chef’s profile was not an option.
Prices are quoted per guest and nothing is bolted on afterwards: the shopping, the cooking, the serving and the clearing are all inside the number, and a vegetarian or allergy version of a course is cooked rather than billed. Between them the three cover Beverly to Rogers Park, out past Naperville, and around the lake into Michigan.
Have an evening in mind?
Start from the kitchen you want, then read that chef’s menus. Three independent Chicago chefs, filed under what they cook, working out of your own kitchen.