The week you don’t cook, shop, or clean up after
Most private-chef bookings in Hawaiʻi are one dinner. This page is about the other way to do it: a chef and a dedicated assistant who come to your villa every day of your stay, cook flexible meals, do all the shopping, and leave the kitchen spotless after every service.
It is the difference between booking a restaurant meal at your villa once, and having the kitchen run properly for the whole trip. No supermarket runs in the heat. No arguments about where to eat with eight people. No breakfast panic before a sunrise hike. You tell us how your group eats; we build the week around it.
If you are looking for a single dinner, a party or a celebration meal, that is a different product — a one-night signature dinner or catering. This page is for stays of three days and longer, and it is priced for them: a chef and assistant by the day, groceries at cost.
What the stay-chef service includes
A professional chef plus a dedicated assistant at your villa — two staff, so cooking, service and cleanup happen together. Flexible meals per day: use each as breakfast, lunch or dinner however you like — two meals one day, three the next, a late lunch after a day trip.
Menu planning around your group: cuisines, spice levels, allergies, kids’ plates and preferences briefed before you arrive and adjusted daily. All grocery shopping and sourcing — island fish, farm produce, specialty items — so you never set foot in a supermarket. Table service and full kitchen cleanup after every meal.
Groceries billed at cost, no markup, every receipt handed over. We do not mark food up and we do not take a supplier commission — the sourcing work is already covered by the day rate.
Who books a chef for the whole stay
Families on a seven-night stay: three meals a day for six to ten people is a logistics job, and with a chef team in the kitchen the villa actually works the way it looked in the listing photos. Groups of friends, 8–12 guests, with split bills, a dietary mix and different schedules — usually cheaper per head than eating out three times a day, and nobody has to book a car.
Long-stay guests and remote workers over two, three or four weeks, where the menu rotation is planned so the food never repeats into boredom. Multi-generational trips — grandparents who eat early, teenagers who eat constantly, one coeliac, one vegetarian — the booking where a chef pays for itself in avoided friction alone. And retreats and workations, where our retreat catering team handles structured multi-day meal plans and a stay chef runs the villa kitchen around it.
The weekly rhythm: you never eat the same dish twice
The most common worry about a chef for a week is repetition. It does not happen, because the menu is planned as a rotation, not a list. Before you arrive we map the whole stay — cuisines you like, dishes you want to try in Hawaiʻi, the one dish the kids will demand again — and build the week so no main dish appears twice.
A typical seven-night arc moves through island seafood, a live-fire night, a Japanese night, a Mediterranean or Italian night, a poolside grill, and one guest’s-choice night where the family picks the theme. Breakfasts rotate through Western, Asian and lighter starts; lunches stay flexible because half of them end up next to a pool.
Families and groups: kids, picky eaters, split sittings
Children are planned into the brief, not accommodated as an afterthought. Ages, allergies and known likes and dislikes go into the menu plan before you arrive — milder spice and familiar formats alongside the adult menu, not instead of it.
Early kids’ sittings are standard: children eat at 17:30, adults dine later — two sittings, one kitchen, no negotiation. Picky eaters are handled quietly; the chef learns in the first two days what actually gets eaten, and the week adjusts. High chairs and snack prep on request — tell us the ages and we plan accordingly.
Pricing: the published rate, no surprises
The stay chef is a day rate for staff, not a per-person food package. The published Stay Chef day rate covers a chef and assistant for one meal a day with menu design, shopping, cooking, service and cleanup; extra meals are quoted the same day. Groceries are always extra, billed at cost with receipts.
For multi-day stays we also publish a per-person, per-day vacation-chef band, shown below by island. A one-off dinner is the opposite model — a per-person quote with the food included — so for one special night, book a signature dinner or catering; for the kitchen run for the week, this page.
Two honest grocery models sit side by side. A one-night signature dinner is priced per guest with the food inside that band. A stay service — a chef for the week, breakfast every morning, a full villa team — bills the staff at published rates and the groceries separately at cost, with receipts, never marked up.
