Two chefs and a front-of-house in your kitchen, a seasonal three courses served to your table, and a kitchen left cleaner than we found it. Eight to twenty people is where this works best.

What actually happens

We arrive well before you sit down. We cook in your kitchen, or in a field kitchen outside it if yours is domestic and the numbers are high. We serve, we clear, we wash up, and we go.

You need an oven, a hob and a sink. Everything else — crockery, glassware, linen, the lot — comes with us if you want it to.

The menu

Seasonal, three courses, from the dinner party menus. Rack of lamb with pomme anna in summer; venison loin with roast celeriac and braised red cabbage in winter. Canapés first if there are drinks before dinner.

Everything is changeable. Simon Gomes, our head chef, would rather build you something than sell you a page.

Why it is worth doing

Because a table of twelve in your own dining room is a better evening than a restaurant, and because the reason people do not do it is the two hours of washing up afterwards. That is the part we take away.

Private chef hire, without the agency

What people usually mean by hiring a private chef is this: somebody comes to your house, cooks properly, serves it, and leaves the kitchen clean.

The difference with us is that you are not booking an individual through an agency and hoping. You get a chef from the same kitchen that caters our weddings, with a front-of-house alongside them, and the company behind both if anything goes wrong.

It costs about what a good private chef costs and it comes with a second pair of hands, which is the part that actually changes the evening — nobody wants the cook leaving the stove to pour wine.

Menus

At home the menu can be more ambitious than at a wedding, because the numbers are smaller and the kitchen is a real one. These are the starting points:

• Dinner party menus — the ones written for exactly this
• Canapés — for the half hour before anyone sits down
• Sharing and feasting menus — for a table that would rather pass things between themselves
• Vegan and vegetarian menus — cooked as dishes, not as an accommodation

Tell us how many, and whether you want us visible or invisible. Both are fine, and it changes how we plan the evening.

Visible or invisible — decide before the night

Some clients want the kitchen door closed and the food to appear. Others want a chef who comes out between courses, explains what people are eating and takes the credit for it. Both work well and they are genuinely different evenings.

What does not work is deciding halfway through, because the two are staffed and paced differently. Tell us which you want when you book and the whole night is shaped around it.

Your kitchen is almost certainly fine

People apologise for their kitchens more than for anything else, and it is almost never warranted. A domestic oven, a hob and a sink is enough for these menus — they are written that way deliberately.

What genuinely helps us: knowing whether the oven is fan or conventional, whether there is a second one, and how much fridge space we can have on the day. What genuinely does not matter: how tidy it is, how old it is, or whether the tiles are what you would have chosen.

If the kitchen is mid-renovation, or there is not one, we can still do it. We take kitchens to fields for a living — see marquee wedding catering. It just needs saying early.

We wash up, and we leave

This is the reason most people book it, and it is included rather than an extra. The kitchen is left as it was found, and we go when the coffee has gone out rather than lingering while you are trying to end the evening.

Numbers, and what suits

Six to about sixteen is where private dining at home genuinely works. Below six it is often better value to eat out. Above sixteen most home kitchens run out of oven and most dining rooms run out of table, at which point it becomes a sharing table or a buffet — and we would say so rather than take the booking and struggle.

The occasions this suits

Anniversaries, a significant birthday where the point is the conversation rather than a party, Christmas with family when whoever normally cooks would rather not, and client dinners at home where the host needs to be in the room. Also, quite often, simply a Friday in February when people want something better than a restaurant without leaving the house.

Related: dinner party menus, milestone birthdays, and directors’ lunches.