Everyone comes to New Orleans for the food, then eats the same three dishes. A private chef is how you eat the rest of it. CHEFIN connects you with vetted chefs across New Orleans and the metro area — a shotgun house Uptown, a place in the Garden District, a French Quarter courtyard, a home across the lake in Metairie. Your chef plans the menu, sources premium ingredients, cooks on-site and cleans up before leaving. Creole done right, a crawfish boil in season, or a menu that goes somewhere the classics don’t. You pick the dining style; we match you with the chef whose cooking suits your menu, your dietary needs and the occasion, then you and your chef shape it together. A concierge stays with it from the first message to the last plate cleared.

Cocktail and canapé packages start from $65 a head, three-course fine dining from $195, tax included. A private chef for one evening or a personal chef on a regular basis: either way, it starts with the same call. Finding a good chef in New Orleans is the easy part. What sits behind them is the rest of it.

You pay per person, and the rate depends on the dining style and how many are coming. Cocktail and canapé packages start from $65 a head, family-style share plates at $165, three-course plated fine dining at $195, and five-course at $245. All inclusive of tax, with nothing added at checkout. There is no call-out fee, no ingredient surcharge and no cleaning charge either. The number you are quoted covers the chef, the premium ingredients, the cooking, the service, and the kitchen left the way they found it.

Each package page shows its current rate. For an exact figure on your date and number of guests, ask the concierge. Prices can shift over Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest and the festival weekends, and for last-minute booking.

What every package includes:

• A vetted private chef, matched to your menu and dietary needs
• Menu planning and revisions with your chef, tailored to your preferences
• Premium ingredients, sourced and shopped for by your chef
• Cooking on site in your kitchen, arriving ahead of service
• Full kitchen and dining area cleanup
• Concierge support from booking through to the evening
• All taxes: the displayed rate is the final rate
• Public liability coverage, background checks on every chef, and payment held in trust until after your event

What sits outside the per-person price:

• Wait staff and bar staff: available as an add-on
• Drinks, tableware, glassware and cutlery: can be arranged as add-ons

A New Orleans bachelorette party is one booking where a private chef makes obvious sense. You have twelve people in a rented house in the Marigny or the Garden District, a weekend already planned around three things a day, and one night where getting a table anywhere good means splitting the group or eating at 10pm.

A chef comes to the house instead. Most groups do it on the first night, when everyone has just arrived, or as the sit-down dinner before going out on Frenchmen. Canapés and cocktails while people are getting ready works well too, and a crawfish boil in the courtyard is a genuine option in spring. Your chef shops for premium ingredients, cooks in the rental kitchen, serves, and cleans up before leaving.

The math usually surprises people. For ten or more, a private chef often comes in under what the same group would spend in the Quarter once drinks and gratuity are counted, and nobody is dividing a four-figure bill twelve ways at the end of the night.

Two things make it run smoothly. Tell the concierge the rental address when you book, because short-term rental kitchens here vary from restaurant-grade to barely equipped. And send every dietary requirement in one go rather than one at a time.

New Orleans is the one American city with a genuinely native cuisine, and our chefs cook it properly. Creole is the city food: French and Spanish technique, African and Caribbean influence, refined over three centuries. Cajun is the country cooking that came down from Acadiana, rougher and hotter. Most visitors use the words interchangeably; your chef will not. Between them our chefs also cover more than twenty other cuisines, because a table of twelve rarely wants gumbo three nights running.

The Gulf is the pantry.
Shrimp and oysters year-round, redfish and speckled trout, blue crab in summer, and crawfish from January through June with the peak in spring. Add Creole tomatoes out of Plaquemines in early summer, satsumas in winter, and Louisiana rice and andouille that are not the same as what you get anywhere else. Our chefs buy from the suppliers and growers they have chosen themselves, shopping close to the day rather than working from a fixed list.

The calendar runs on festivals, not seasons.
October through May is when the city is at its best and hosting is easy. Mardi Gras, French Quarter Fest and Jazz Fest each turn the restaurant scene inside out, which is exactly when a chef at your own table is worth most. Summer is hot and wet, and menus get lighter and later for it.

The kitchens are older than most.
New Orleans runs on shotgun houses with the kitchen at the back, Creole cottages, converted doubles, Garden District homes with proper pantries, and short-term rentals stocked with whatever the owner left behind. A Bywater shotgun and an Uptown kitchen are two different evenings to cook. Tell your concierge which one you have, and mention the courtyard if there is one.