PLANNING — GUIDE
What Does a Private Chef Service Actually Include?
Shopping to spotless kitchen — the full anatomy of the service, including the lines that are legitimately extra and the ones that should never be.
A private chef service includes the menu consult, ingredient shopping, cooking, plating, table service and full kitchen cleanup. Groceries are either included or billed at cost with receipts — both models are legitimate if stated. Wine, rentals, waiters, travel and festive multipliers are quoted separately by honest operators. from R850 pp per person · Min invoice R3,900.
The short answer
A private chef service includes the menu consult, ingredient shopping, cooking, plating, table service and full kitchen cleanup. Groceries are either included or billed at cost with receipts — both models are legitimate if stated. Wine, rentals, waiters, travel and festive multipliers are quoted separately by honest operators.
The search results for this question are dominated by platform FAQs, which answer for their own model only. This is the operator-neutral anatomy: what the service is, line by line, and how to read any quote against it — including ours.
The day, hour by hour — what the fee buys
Before the day: a menu consult — dietary requirements, kitchen recon, the shape of the evening. This conversation is where good services are made; skip it and you are buying a stranger with knives.
The morning: shopping. Fish from the harbour-side fishmongers, produce from the markets — the sourcing is part of the craft, and the receipts are part of the honesty.
Three to four hours before first course: the chef arrives, preps, and sets the kitchen. Canapés at the agreed time, courses paced to your table — not to a kitchen's convenience — dessert and coffee, and then the part guests consistently underrate: the kitchen left spotless. The service ends when your kitchen looks like the evening never happened.
Included, and legitimately extra
The two columns every quote should show you. Both are fine — hiding either is not.
Included
- menu consult and dietary planning
- shopping, cooking, plating and service
- full kitchen cleanup
- a fixed itemised quote before deposit
Quoted separately
- groceries (at cost with receipts, or built into the rate — stated either way)
- wine and sommelier pairing
- waiters, rentals and out-of-area travel
- festive multipliers (public holidays 1.5×; 25/31 December and 1 January at 2×)
How a quote should itemise
The test of a quote is whether a stranger could audit it. Chef fee: stated. Groceries: estimated in the quote, settled at cost with receipts attached to the final invoice. Travel: a published zone fee or zero, not a surprise. Staffing: counted and hourly. Multipliers: applied to named dates, disclosed in version one.
When a line is missing, the price is not lower — it is later. Our private chef dinner page shows the structure as a product, the rate card publishes the numbers, and the booking protection page puts the cancellation and replacement terms in the same place. That is what 'included' looks like when it is written down.
Two inclusions deserve their own mention because guests consistently underrate them. The first is the consult: dietary requirements, kitchen recon, pacing preferences — the conversation that turns a generic menu into your evening. Services that skip it are selling a product, not planning an event. The second is the sourcing itself: a Cape Town chef's morning at the fishmonger and the market is where the menu stops being a document and becomes dinner. You are not paying for shopping time; you are paying for knowing which snoek to buy.
And one honest exclusion to expect everywhere: your kitchen is the venue, and it stays your responsibility. A standard home kitchen — hob, oven, counter space, running water — is all that is required, and the recon conversation flags anything beyond that in advance. What a chef will not do is renovate your kitchen on the day; what a good one will do is bring induction backup and a plan B, which is why the consult asks about the kitchen before it asks about the dessert.
Read any service description against this anatomy and the marketing falls away fast. 'Full-service private chef' should mean every line of the included column; if it means fewer, the price should say so. The words are cheap. The itemisation is the product.
Questions, answered.
We update this guide annually — figures re-verified October 2026.
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