A private chef website that takes the inquiry properly the first time.
Your site, plus an inquiry flow built around how private dining actually gets booked — date, headcount, where, what kind of dinner, dietary needs, budget range. It lands in a dashboard you run yourself. You update your own menus, gallery and testimonials. You don't message a developer to change a price.
Where private chef bookings go wrong
Most chefs I've looked at have the same setup: a nice-looking site, a contact form with three fields, and an inbox doing all the real work.
- "Hi, are you free in October?" — and now it's five emails before you know if it's six people or thirty.
- Dietary restrictions surface at the end, after you've already built a menu around scallops.
- People ask what you charge, you explain per-head pricing from scratch, again.
- A great inquiry arrives while you're on a job and gets answered three days later.
- Menus live in a PDF from last spring, because updating it means emailing whoever built the site.
None of that is a design problem. It's a question-order problem, and a who-can-edit-this problem.
What the inquiry flow asks for
Every question that would otherwise cost you an email round-trip, asked before they hit send:
The event
- Date, and whether it's fixed or flexible
- Headcount
- Location — their home, a rental, a venue
- What kind of dinner it is: intimate dinner party, celebration, corporate, weekly meal prep
The food
- Allergies and dietary restrictions, in a field that can't be skipped
- Anything they specifically want or specifically don't
- Service style — plated, family-style, grazing
- Budget range, so you both find out early if it isn't a fit
Your terms sit on the page, before the form. Minimum headcount. How far you travel and what you charge past it. Deposit and cancellation window. Whether groceries are billed separately. What a menu revision costs. When that's written down where people read it, the conversations that follow start from a much better place.
The parts you change yourself
This is the bit that matters most for a chef, and the bit most sites get wrong. Your business changes every season; your website shouldn't need a developer to keep up.
You edit
- Menus and sample menus — seasonal changes, new dishes, prices
- Service details and what each package includes
- Gallery — add photos from last weekend's dinner yourself
- Testimonials, as clients send them
- Blog or notes, if you want somewhere to write
The dashboard handles
- Inquiries in a pipeline — new, talking, booked, passed
- Everything one client sent on a single screen
- Private notes only you see
- Calendar sync so a booked date is a booked date
It's a real working demo, built for a tattoo studio but running the same system. Open it and click around — no signup, nothing to install, nothing you can break that matters.
A chef site I'm building now
She isn't launched yet, so I'm not going to pretend otherwise or link a domain that doesn't resolve. The dashboard above is the demo one — hers holds real client inquiries, so it stays private.
What it does, and what it doesn't do yet
Today
- Takes inquiries with full event and dietary detail
- Syncs to your calendar
- Menus, gallery, testimonials and pages you edit yourself
- Keeps notes and history against each client
Not yet
- Taking deposits by card on the site
- Instant self-serve booking without you confirming
- Invoicing and grocery cost tracking
I'd rather say that here than after you've paid. If you need one of those, tell me — I built the back end, so I can build to fit, and you'd get a fixed quote before anything starts.
What it costs
Four to six weeks for a full build. Three rounds of changes included. Fixed quote in writing before anything starts, and your domain stays in your name on your card. Full pricing and what's included →
Questions chefs ask
- Can I change my menus without asking you?
- Yes — that's the point of the dashboard. Menus, prices, photos, testimonials, service details. You log in and edit. No ticket, no waiting on me.
- Can I block out dates I'm not available?
- Yes. Close inquiries entirely when you're booked out, or mark dates unavailable so nobody asks for a night you're already working.
- What if I do more than one thing — dinners, meal prep, classes?
- The inquiry form branches. Someone asking about weekly meal prep gets different questions than someone planning a birthday dinner for twenty, and they land in the same dashboard, tagged.
- Do I own it?
- Yes. The site, the code, the client data, and your domain — registered in your name, on your card. It should never need anyone's permission to stay yours.
- What happens to inquiries if I stop paying the care plan?
- Take the handover for $400 and it moves to your own accounts — hosting, database, domain, all in your name — and it keeps running without me. Nothing about this is built to trap you.
Tell me how you take bookings now
What you cook, how people reach you, and what you're tired of retyping. I'll tell you straight whether I'm the right person and what it would cost.
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