dining
The wine question nobody asks when hiring a chef
Most private chefs will cook you a superb dinner and leave the drinking to you. A few can do both — and in Westchester at least one is a certified sommelier.
When you hire a private chef for a dinner party, the menu is agreed and the wine is usually left to the host. Asking whether your chef can pair it — and whether they want to — changes the evening.
Here is how most private dinner parties get planned. You agree a date. You agree a menu, usually after a conversation about what people won’t eat. And then, at some point in the week before, you stand in a wine shop and guess.
The chef has thought carefully about six courses. You have thought about the wine for eleven minutes. Something is out of balance.
The pairing is usually nobody’s job
This is not a criticism of chefs. Cooking and wine are separate disciplines with separate training, and a chef who says “I’ll leave the wine to you” is being honest rather than unhelpful. The default division of labour is reasonable.
But it does mean the drinking half of the evening routinely gets a fraction of the attention the eating half gets — in a format where the two are supposed to be in conversation.
Some chefs can take it off you
A small number of private chefs are trained on both sides. Fred Cottineau, who works across Westchester, is a certified sommelier as well as a cook, and lists food and wine pairing among his services rather than tucking it away as an extra. His route through the trade included a Michelin-starred kitchen in France and an Italian wine bar in New York, which is a background that would be odd not to have produced an opinion about wine.
That combination is uncommon enough to be worth asking about specifically. It is not usually on the front page, because chefs lead with food.
What to ask, and when
Ask before the menu is fixed, not after. A chef who pairs will often want to move a course to make a bottle work, and that conversation is free before the menu is agreed and awkward afterwards.
Three useful questions:
- Do you pair, or would you rather I did? Either answer is fine. The point is to find out early.
- Do I buy, or do you? Some chefs will shop for wine and bill it through. Others will give you a list and let you buy it, which is usually cheaper.
- What are you actually cooking? If the menu leans acidic, or sweet, or very rich, that constrains the wine far more than the protein does.
If your chef doesn’t pair
Then give the wine the same lead time the food gets. Send the menu to whoever is selling you the bottles — an actual shop, with an actual person in it — a week ahead rather than the afternoon of. A good merchant given a real menu and a real budget will out-perform anything you improvise at six o’clock.
The failure mode is not buying the wrong wine. It is deciding late.