A private chef for twenty in Ireland, or a restaurant private room?

Someone has volunteered your house. There are twenty-two people coming, the date is a Saturday five weeks out, and you've typed the words "I'll sort the food" into a group chat where they cannot now be unsaid. So you search private dining and your city, and you get back a wall of hotel function rooms, restaurant listings and directory pages, nearly all of which publish a capacity number and none of which publish a price.

There are two real answers to a group that size in Ireland. Book a private room and hand the night to somebody else's building, or hire a private chef to cook where you already are. The first is easy to find and hard to price. The second is harder to find and much harder to picture, because nobody writes down what actually happens when twenty people eat dinner in a normal Irish kitchen.

This is the group organiser's version. What the money looks like at 10, 20 and 30, what a domestic oven can and can't do, where in Ireland you can genuinely get a chef for numbers like that, and the nights where the restaurant room wins.

The trade you're making

Put the food aside, because both options will get the food right. What you're choosing between is who owns the logistics and who owns the clock.

A restaurant private room buys you somebody else's problem. Their staff, their glassware, their licence, their cleanup. If a plate goes on the floor or the heating packs in, it's not your night that breaks. In exchange you take their hours, their menu structure, their minimum spend, and the moment when someone starts quietly stacking chairs.

A chef at your table buys you the room for as long as you want it. Your music, your seating plan, no last orders, nobody driving home. In exchange you own the building, the parking, the neighbours, the bin, and everyone under that roof. It's whether you want to host the night or attend it.

What changes once you go past ten guests

Plenty of group organisers assume a private chef is for six people at a nice table, and anything in the twenties means ringing a caterer. That's not what the live supply says.

Of the 25 private chef listings live on CaterKin today, 24 take 10 guests or more and 17 take 20 or more. The largest takes 100. At the other end the smallest minimum is one guest, so "we're too many" and "we're too few" are both usually wrong. You can see the spread of private chefs across Ireland and what each one takes. What changes above ten isn't whether a chef will do it. It's the format, the furniture and the kitchen.

Past roughly 25 or 30 the honest answer often stops being a private chef and starts being event catering for bigger numbers, which is built for volume and doesn't depend on your oven. For the full version of where the line falls between a chef and a caterer by guest count, that's a separate read.

Does the price per head come down with numbers?

Sort of, but not as a discount and not because anyone is knocking money off. Hosts set their own prices on CaterKin. What changes is the format you pick, and the formats that work at scale cost less to produce than the ones built for a table of six.

Across the 41 packages live from private chefs right now, prices run from €30 to €198 per person, median €75, average €79. Those are prices hosts set themselves, not a platform rate card, so treat them as indicative and check the figure on a profile.

The ends of that range tell you more than the middle. A buffet-style package listed at €50 per person carries a 10 guest minimum, because buffet at ten is efficient and buffet at four is daft. A five course tasting menu is €90, an Italian sharing menu €75, a canape and small bite menu €75, a signature three course €80. A group of twenty choosing sharing plates over plated courses is not haggling. It is asking for a different job of work, and the price follows the work. For pricing beyond group scale, what a private chef costs per head in Ireland covers it.

Cuisines live on the platform run from modern European and Italian through Indian, Asian fusion, Mediterranean, Irish and seafood to vegan and vegetarian menus. At group scale, settle the format before the cuisine.

Can a home kitchen really plate twenty covers?

Nobody answers this online, and it decides whether the night works. Short answer, yes, but the menu has to be built for the kitchen rather than the other way round. Your constraint isn't the chef's ability. It's one oven, four rings, one sink and one fridge, all of it sized for a family of four.

A chef who takes 20 plus guests plans around exactly that. The menu tilts towards dishes that hold and even improve: braises, slow roasts, whole baked fish, big trays of something. Anything that dies ninety seconds out of the pan is the wrong call at this size. Twenty steaks seared to twenty different degrees on a domestic hob is the request that turns a good night into a long one, and a decent chef will tell you that before you book.

Fridge space is the underrated one. Twenty covers of anything needs somewhere cold for a few hours, so if a host asks how big your fridge is, that's not small talk. You also need a clear run of worktop to plate on. An island is gold. A galley kitchen with the kettle, the bread bin and the post on every surface is a problem you can fix in ten minutes.

On staffing, be direct in the first message. At a small dinner one chef often works alone. At twenty or thirty most chefs bring help, and how many is their call rather than a fixed ratio. Ask whether the quoted price includes serving staff. That question is what makes two quotes at the same headline number comparable.

Where twenty people sit, and what you hire in

Sort the room before the menu. Seating is the part people leave until last, and it's the part that decides the night. The food arrives and there's nowhere to put twenty people down.

Almost no Irish house seats twenty at one table. What people do instead is two long tables, or trestles hired in and dressed so they stop looking like trestles, or they accept that at 25 plus it becomes a standing and grazing night with seats for whoever needs one. All three work. Deciding at four o'clock on the day does not. Then there's the stuff nobody owns twenty of.

• Tables and chairs. Trestles and folding chairs hire cheaply and fit in a car boot.
• Plates and cutlery. Your set doesn't stretch to twenty matching mains plus starters plus dessert. Nobody's does.
• Glasses. They vanish once people put one down and forget which was theirs.
• Linen, or something over the trestle that is not a bedsheet.
• Bin capacity, and somewhere to stack empties out of sight.

Ask the host what they bring, because some chefs travel with serving dishes and platters and some don't. Then do the dull bit. Tell the neighbours, work out where a dozen cars go, and decide in advance what time the music comes down.

What catches group organisers out in a restaurant room

None of this is a venue being sneaky. A private room is a piece of a restaurant they can't sell to anyone else that night, so they protect it. But the terms are rarely on the page you found, and they set your real cost per head.

• Minimum spend rather than a price per head. You're agreeing a floor on the bill, and if the group under-orders you top it up.
• A mandatory set menu above a certain group size. Ask what that size is, because it is often lower than you assume.
• Room hire charged separately from the food.
• A deposit, and a deadline for final numbers. After that deadline you pay for the two who pull out on the Friday.
• Table time. The room is yours until a stated hour, then somebody else has it.
• Service charge, and whether it is applied automatically to groups.
• Drinks. This is where the bill actually moves. Ask for the wine list before you agree anything, not on the night.

Get those seven answers in writing and you can compare the two options honestly. Skip them and you're holding a food price against a total price, which is how people get a fright at the end of a lovely night.

When the restaurant room is the better call

We would rather you booked the right thing than our thing. For smaller numbers the choice is a different one, and private chef vs restaurant vs caterer by occasion covers date nights and small dinners. At group scale there are still nights where a private room is plainly the better call.

• Nobody wants to host. Someone has to open their house, mind everyone in it, and still be together enough at midnight to notice a candle. If no one wants that job, don't talk somebody into it.
• The group is drinking properly and wants a late licence, a bar, and glassware that belongs to someone else.
• Everyone is coming from a different direction and the house is nowhere near a bus, a train or a taxi rank. Central beats charming once twenty schedules are involved.
• The house cannot seat them and you'd rather not spend a chunk of the budget on hired furniture to make it.
• You want a fixed finish. A private room ends. Your house does not, and at three in the morning that is either the point or the problem.
• The occasion is formal or work-adjacent, and a colleague's family photographs are the wrong setting.

If you're in Dublin, the format side of this is already written up in detail. The Dublin comparison of private rooms, chef's tables and supper clubs explains what each one means and how they differ, and private dining in Dublin is where to start if a chef at the table is the direction you're going.

Which Irish cities can deliver a chef for a group right now

Coverage is the thing a directory never tells you honestly, so here's the live picture. These are chefs whose own stated service radius reaches the town, not chefs who share a county with it.

Cork needs one caveat, and it is better said now than after you've messaged. The two chefs who cover Cork travel in from Co. Kerry, the nearest from about 66km away. That works, but raise travel in your first message rather than your last, because it affects price and arrival time.

Wexford, Sligo and Letterkenny have nobody yet. Not a thin choice, none. If you're organising a group dinner in those places, the restaurant room is your answer for now, and we'd rather tell you than waste your evening.

Dublin is the only market where you can be fussy, with 19 chefs covering the city. But the biggest group capacity is not where people expect it. Killarney has the largest single group capacity live anywhere on the platform, and thirty people in rural Kerry is genuinely easier to feed than thirty in a lot of bigger towns. Limerick and Galway are where to compare hosts if you're on that side of the country.

If the venue is not your own house

A group of twenty often isn't in anybody's house. It's a place rented for the weekend, a hall, a room in a club, a let with a kitchen nobody has laid eyes on. Chefs cook in all of those, and the rules shift.

The change is that you can't answer the kitchen questions from memory. Photograph the oven, the hob, the fridge and the worktop when you arrive, and send the pictures. Check what the place stocks, because a fully equipped kitchen in a letting description usually means equipped for six. Put the venue address on the booking rather than your home, flag parking and access, and read the letting terms for a finish time before you plan a night that runs past it.

The upside is the whole reason people do it. Nobody drives, nobody leaves early to catch a lift, and the group stays put all night. It also suits the Kerry end of the map, where two hosts run a 100km radius and will travel to whatever house you've rented.

What to put in the first message

Hosts quote from information. Give them all of it at once and you get a real answer instead of three rounds of questions.

• The date, and whether it is fixed or movable.
• Actual headcount, adults and children, and how firm it is.
• The address, or at least the town, so travel is priced in from the start.
• The format you want: plated courses, sharing plates, a buffet, or canapes standing.
• Where people will sit, and whether you are hiring furniture.
• The kitchen in one line. Oven, hob, fridge, worktop.
• Every dietary need, at the start rather than the week before.
• Whether you want serving staff, and who is clearing up afterwards.

On timing, there's no fixed lead time, but a chef takes one booking for an evening, and twenty people isn't a job anybody slots in around another. If your date is set, message early rather than late.

And if the reply says your kitchen won't carry the menu you had in your head, take that seriously. A chef telling you what won't work in your house is doing the most useful thing they can.