The question that decides this service is not what is cooked. It is who asked for it. A private chef in a house you own is one arrangement when you are the one sitting down to dinner, and a different one when the person asking is a guest staying in your house while you are three thousand miles away.
This office arranges both, on one rule that does not move: the request is quoted before the day, it is billed to whoever asked for it, and it is never folded into the management fee. It is a concierge errand rather than a standing service, so an owner who never asks for it never pays anything towards it.
Two doors lead to the same chef, and they are not the same arrangement.
Neither route touches the management fee, and that is the whole point of keeping them separate. Our fee is a percentage of income, net of expenses; in-villa chef service sits outside it, and so does every other concierge errand. Where the house is let, the stay itself — the calendar, the guest, the arrival and the departure — belongs to vacation rental management and is already paid for. The chef begins where that booking ends.
Three things, asked for singly or together, for a date rather than for a season:
What is not on that list can still be asked for, and the answer is either a quotation or a plain no. What you will not be handed is a catalogue: the suppliers are chosen one at a time by the team that works in that place, which is the only way a private chef in Cancún, a private chef in San Miguel de Allende and a private chef in Los Cabos can each be somebody's actual choice rather than a search result.
This is not a permanent staffing arrangement and not a meal-delivery service. It is an errand: asked for, quoted, carried out once, closed.
In Tulum the kitchen is the last thing to be settled. On the coastal strip the houses run without mains drainage or a grid connection, on their own generators, so dinner for a full house is a power question before it is a menu question: no fuel means no refrigeration, and a provisioned house without refrigeration lasts hours. A chef is confirmed here after the generator is, not before.
The second variable is the season, and it decides where the table goes rather than whether there is one. Sargassum runs April to October with a June-to-August peak, with November to April the clean months, and in 2026 it reached Quintana Roo in January, months ahead of the typical April start. A dinner promised on the beach in May is a promise made about somebody else's coastline; the same dinner on a terrace is a promise we can keep. That is the conversation we would rather have in March than on the day.
Everything else about the area itself — how a house there is administered across the year — is on its own page. This section is only about what changes when someone is cooking in it.
In Los Cabos the constraint is not the calendar, it is water and weather. Drinking water in San José del Cabo is distributed by tandeo, in turns scheduled by OOMSAPAS, and a full house consumes more of it than an empty one does. Provisioning there begins with water and ends with the menu, in that order.
The weather decides whether a dinner can be planned outdoors at all. The corridor is arid — roughly 250 mm of rain a year and more than 300 days of sun, with September the wettest month — which is why a September dinner is quoted with an indoor alternative already agreed and a March one is not. Neither of those is a detail a chef is expected to raise. It is the sort of thing the office that holds the keys is supposed to know before you ask.
There is no figure on this page and there will not be one. What a private chef costs for a day depends on the number at the table, the menu, the date and the place, and a single number written here would be wrong in five of the six areas we work in. Each request is quoted before it is carried out, and nothing is carried out without approval.
Two things are charged: what the supplier costs, and what it costs to find that supplier, brief them and answer for the result. Both are said in advance rather than explained afterwards.
Then it appears on your monthly statement as a line of its own, with its own supporting invoice, kept apart from the arithmetic of the property's own costs. You can read what was spent, in the month it was spent, without asking anybody — and where a guest was the one who asked, you can read that it was not charged to you.
A chef and staff are one of the concierge errands this office takes, alongside drivers, flights and reservations: optional, quoted per use, billed to whoever uses them. The upkeep of the building itself is a different contract — scheduled inspections, preventive maintenance, standing suppliers — and it runs whether or not anybody asks for anything, on full-service management. The rest of what this office does is on the services overview.
No. Staff are arranged for a set of dates and the arrangement ends with them. A permanent household payroll is a different undertaking and not one this office offers.
The guest does, in almost every case: a private chef in a vacation rental is quoted to whoever asked for it. You set the rule once — what may be offered and up to what amount — and after that the quotation goes to the guest rather than to your account.
That is the usual case. The request reaches this office from wherever you are, the quotation comes back to you before anything is booked, and the people carrying it out are the ones who already hold the keys to the house. Nothing is arranged without approval.
No, and it is not meant to be. It is optional, quoted before the date and billed to whoever asked for it, so a year without a request is a year without a charge.
Yes, and it is the request owners make most. You send the list, the shopping is done before you arrive and put away, and there is drinking water in the house.
Start with who is likely to be in the house — you, your family, a guest during a let — and who you want deciding what may be asked for and up to what amount. We will answer with what that would involve where the house is, and what is worth settling before the season rather than during it.