Private Chef Cost Per Month vs Per Event: The Honest Math

The search behind this question is real and the honest answer is that it hides two different jobs. The first is a household chef: someone who cooks for your family on a schedule, plans meals, does the shopping and works in your kitchen on a weekday. That is an employment arrangement rather than a booking, and it is priced either as a salary with the employer costs that sit on top of any Israeli salary — pension contributions, severance provision, national insurance, paid holiday and sick days — or as a freelance rate per visit. Anyone who quotes you a flat monthly figure without first saying which of those two structures they mean has not given you a price. They have given you a guess.

The second job is a private fire chef for an occasion: one chef, one fire, premium cuts cooked in front of the table and served in waves, on your balcony, roof or garden. That is what RBBQ does, and it is priced per evening rather than per month. ₪1,900 for two, ₪2,700 for four, ₪3,500 for six, and ₪400 for each guest beyond that up to about ten. Every one of those figures includes 18% VAT, and there is no service charge and no expected tip on a chef you hired directly. Nothing is rented separately and there is no setup fee.

We do not sell a retainer, a subscription or a package of dates at a discount, and it is fairer to say that plainly than to invent one. So the monthly number is arithmetic you can do yourself, which is exactly why the table below exists.

Read the right-hand column before the left one. A household that hosts properly six times a year at a table of six spends ₪21,000 across the year, which averages to ₪1,750 a month. That is the number most people are actually asking about when they type the question, and it looks nothing like the weekly figure.

Because almost none of the cost is the cooking. An evening carries a menu built with you in advance, a butcher run for cuts bought that week rather than pulled from a freezer, the drive and the loading, roughly 60 to 90 minutes of setup before anyone eats, the charcoal, the fire held at temperature across several courses, service through the evening, and a cleanup that leaves the space as it was. Booking that same evening four times in a month does not make any one of those steps shorter. It just means we do them four times.

This is where a genuine retainer differs, and it is worth understanding rather than dismissing. A household chef employed on a schedule really does get cheaper per meal, because the shopping is consolidated, the kitchen is already theirs, the equipment stays put, there is no setup and no breakdown, and a weekday dinner is not a multi-course occasion. That efficiency is real. It is simply not available to a chef who brings a fire and a full mise en place to a different address each time.

So if someone offers you a live-fire chef on a discounted monthly subscription, ask which of those steps they intend to skip. In practice the answer is the sourcing: cheaper cuts, or meat bought in bulk and frozen ahead. That is a legitimate business, but it is a different product from the one you thought you were pricing.

Guest count, decisively. The private-chef format is priced per evening, so the more people sit at the table, the less each of them costs. Two guests at ₪1,900 is ₪950 a head. Four at ₪2,700 is ₪675. Six at ₪3,500 is ₪583. That curve keeps bending in your favour right up to about ten guests, which is where one chef on one fire runs out of hands.

Past that, the format changes and the per-head number drops again, hard. Event catering starts at 20 guests and runs at ₪290 per guest all-inclusive, ₪315 if the menu carries two premium cuts and ₪340 with three or more, against a ₪6,700 event minimum that binds up to about 23 people. A 30-guest party is ₪8,700 and a 40-guest one is ₪11,600. Children are billed at 55% of a portion, applied to the food rather than to the consumables.

Put those side by side and the shape of the decision is clear. One evening for six costs ₪583 a head. One evening for thirty costs ₪290 a head. Doing the six-guest dinner twice as often costs twice as much; inviting more people to one of them costs less per person than doing it at all.

The honest gap sits between ten and twenty guests, and any caterer who answers smoothly there is guessing. It is too many for one chef on a single fire and still below the event minimum, so a 14-guest dinner pays the same ₪6,700 floor as a 23-guest one. That floor is not aimed at you. The van, the crew call, the setup and the cleanup cost nearly the same whether the guest list is 14 or 23.

Weekly is almost never it. The rhythm that actually repeats here is the calendar: Friday night when the family is already coming, the Tishrei run of Rosh Hashana and Sukkot, a birthday that lands in the same month every year, a Pesach-adjacent gathering, an engagement or a Shabbat chatan. That is four to eight occasions a year for a household that hosts seriously, and each of them is a separate booking at the published price.

Treating it that way costs you nothing and buys you something a subscription would not. Because there is no retainer, there is also no dead month: you do not pay in February for a fire you did not light. And because the price is fixed per evening rather than negotiated per relationship, the number you were quoted in March is the number in October.

What booking ahead does buy is the date itself. Thursday evenings, Friday afternoons, the Tishrei window in September and October, the run-up to Pesach and Yom Ha'atzmaut all fill first, and a late request into one of those windows is often a genuine no rather than a negotiation. If you know you host every Rosh Hashana, say so in August. A 50% deposit is what holds a date; the final headcount can still move until a few days before.

There is one recurring arrangement we do run, and it is worth naming so the picture is complete: companies that book us several times across a year for offsites, holiday evenings and team dinners. That is still per-event pricing on each date, with no retainer and no annual commitment. What changes is only that the calendar conversation happens once instead of four times.

Premium cuts cooked to temperature over charcoal, plus everything around them. Entrecôte, picanha, tomahawk, sirloin, Denver and flat iron on the steak side; pargit, kebab, merguez, wings, arayes and skewers on the grill side. Starters, salads, breads, house sauces and hot sides come off the same fire. Guests who do not eat meat are a menu input rather than an emergency: named guests eat salmon, sea bass or denis instead of meat and are counted that way, as a substitution rather than an extra course.

The meat is bought from named butchers rather than an anonymous supplier, and the name goes on your quote: Bat HaKatzav on Brodetzky 43 in Ramat Aviv, Meshek Lagziel and Roni Tassa's boutique butchery in Ramat Gan, and for mehadrin requests Atliz Lemhadrin on Tzora 3 in Kfar Shalem, which carries Badatz Machpud, Beit Yosef and Eda HaChareidis certification. Kosher is available on request rather than a standing certification we claim, and a mehadrin evening means an on-site mashgiach and a kashered grill, arranged per event and quoted as its own line rather than buried inside the per-guest number. Whichever standard you need, the butcher and its certifying body belong in writing on the quote, and you can check that shop yourself against the Chief Rabbinate's public kosher business database before paying a deposit.

The requirement for the space is ventilation rather than size. Charcoal produces smoke and carbon monoxide, so the grill stands somewhere genuinely open: a balcony that is open rather than glassed in, a roof terrace, a courtyard, a garden. There is no indoor version of this. If the roof is shared it belongs to the va'ad bayit, so ask before you fix a date, and in a dense Tel Aviv building a weeknight evening should be winding down around 23:00.

We cover Tel Aviv, Gush Dan and the Sharon with no travel surcharge, which is why the calculator on the homepage has no field for your address. Booking runs on WhatsApp, the quote is a written message with numbers in it rather than a designed PDF, and a photograph of the balcony, roof or garden answers more than a paragraph of description.