A Private Chef for an At-Home Wedding or Micro-Wedding

Maggie and Wes, 2023

Not every couple wants a ballroom. Some of the most moving weddings I have cooked were for twelve people in a backyard, twenty in a family home, or two people who eloped and wanted one perfect dinner to mark it.

A micro-wedding trades the scale of a big reception for something a large wedding can rarely offer: intimacy, immense culinary quality, and a meal that is genuinely about the two people at the center of it. When there are twelve guests instead of two hundred, every course can be extraordinarily detailed and considered. Every dish can mean something. I can cook the meal from your first date, or the flavors from where one of you grew up, and everyone in the room will notice the difference.

The place can be the point

A banquet hall is a beautiful blank space you rent for a night. A home, a garden, a family's house on the North Shore, these are places that already hold meaning for you. When I bring the kitchen somewhere like that, your wedding happens in a spot that is already part of your story, not a venue you will never stand in again, that thousands of other couples have moved tehir way through.

You can see how we think about weddings and private dining at home.

A meal made for two people

At a large wedding, dinner is a logistics problem solved for hundreds. At an intimate one, it becomes something else entirely. We design the menu together, around the two of you, the way you would plan the most important dinner of your life, because that is what it is. Dietary needs across a small table are easy to honor beautifully, and the pacing follows your toasts and your first dance, not a venue's schedule.

The Vendador Table at Home

If you are dreaming of a wedding that feels like the two of you and not like everyone else's, I would love to cook it. Email chefs@vendador.com, call 630-864-9349, or reserve your experience.

— Chef Francis Pascal, founder of Vendador