Kitchen parties: Eat in good company while chefs direct the show

As restaurant prices continue to climb, diners are increasingly asking for a little more bang for their buck. To make a dining experience more memorable, interactions with chefs are often part of a high-end dining experience, creating mini-kitchen parties where customers can feel like they had a meaningful interaction with the person cooking the food. From elite Michelin-level dining experiences to special dinners in a guest’s own home, chef engagement is becoming an essential part of the menu.

The top place in Calgary to get up close and personal with a chef is Eight, a small restaurant tucked behind Nupo, the Japanese-style restaurant in the East Village’s Alt Hotel. Eight is the creation of chef Darren MacLean, known for his Calgary restaurant Shokunin and as a competitor on the Netflix program The Final Table. While customers still get a taste of MacLean’s food at Shokunin and Nupo, dining at Eight is a decidedly more intimate experience. With only eight guests at each seating, everyone gets to chat with MacLean as he prepares an exquisite multi-course meal and explains each dish’s uniquely Canadian components and the techniques used.

“The chef-guest connection at Eight is so special because there are no boundaries to the experience,” MacLean says. “Generally in a restaurant, the guest is separated from the chef, often catching glimpses of them through a pass window. At Eight, the guest can access the chef throughout the whole meal, ask questions and hear the stories behind the dishes and how or why they came to be while they’re being cooked and plated mere feet away. This creates a sense of intimacy that is unparalleled in the industry nationwide.”

Eight is infamously difficult to get into and the ticket price is outside of many diners’ budgets. But there are other ways to have some time with a talented chef. Personal or private chef services are becoming increasingly popular with both chefs and diners, especially in the pandemic era when many kitchen pros want to get out of the restaurant game and diners might prefer the comfort of eating in their own homes.

The concept is simple: a chef comes into a private home to cook dinner, usually for a small dinner party. While personal chefs may be asked to keep to themselves in the kitchen, guests often prefer to convene in the kitchen to hang out with the chef. Alex Edmonson, former executive chef at Market restaurant and a contestant on the 2021 round of Top Chef Canada, started his AE Chef Services company as a way to pursue his craft outside of a restaurant setting. He says that the chef/client engagement can be as rewarding for him as it is for those he feeds.

“You can tell when a client is a foodie because they’ll ask how I’m doing certain things or they’ll request a recipe,” Edmonson says. “The people who are interested in engaging are a great fit for me, too. It makes it more enjoyable when I can put on that show and have that client/chef banter. It’s really fun.”

While personal chefs like Edmonson don’t mind fielding questions and giving tips, interactive cooking classes, such as those offered at Cookbook Co. Cooks, offer a more explicit educational experience. The store’s downstairs Bistro Kitchen hosts hands-on classes for up to 20 students, all taught by expert chefs. The intent is for guests to learn a cooking skill or two, but with a couple of glasses of wine included, the classes inevitably turn into social events, as well.

“Even if you are an accomplished cook, you usually end up learning something about a product or a technique,” says owner Gail Norton, who teaches many of the classes herself. “A lot of people enjoy seeing the ease of someone else cooking. The classes teach people how to relax and have a bit more joie de vivre around cooking.”

Chef-intensive restaurant dinners, private home chefs and hands-on kitchen classes all ultimately serve the same purpose, which is to get people to better connect with their food through the people making it. You might learn a thing or two, and eating well with good company, including the company of the chef, truly makes for a well-balanced meal.