Private dinners, pop-ups, supper clubs, classes. Pricing, deposits, cancellations, filling a room, getting booked again. The part nobody trained you for — with the real numbers.
Vancouver, BC · Since 1966
Every private chef I've talked to says it. It's why the calendar is feast or famine, and why growth stops at the edge of your contact list.
A 25% discount feels like 25%. On a $195 ticket with $60 of food inside it, it's 37% of your margin. Nobody showed you that math, so nobody's charging enough.
The sitter. The fish you cut to show them. The fees on the add-ons. The twelve hours nobody paid you for. Most "profitable" nights aren't.
The chefs with full calendars all say a version of it. The ones starting out don't believe it's allowed.
Full-time kitchen job, private work on the side, and no way to say "hire me" out loud without it getting back to someone.
"Too much business" scares the good ones more than too little. They want the right nights, not all of them.
Patterns from a year of recorded conversations with working private chefs in Vancouver. Names stay out of it — that's rule four.
A ticketed filleting class at my shop, run twice in a week. Every number, including the ones I'd rather not show you.
| The night | Pilotfriends & photos · 6 seats | First paid night4 of 6 sold · every seat discounted | Full price, sold outthe model |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tickets | $3006 × $50 | $4881 × $50 · 3 × $146 | $1,1706 × $195 |
| Add-ons | included | —not counted yet | ~$345half take oysters, a third take caviar |
| Platform & card fees | −$20 | −$32 | −$100 |
| Food & drink | −$750everything included, for six | −$240 | −$470fish + add-on product |
| Fixed for the night | $0 | −$246sitter · demo fish · ads | −$246 |
| Net | −$470 | −$30 | ~$700 |
Same class, same fish, same room. The gap between the second column and the third is discounts and add-on uptake — nothing else. Twelve hours between two of us, every time. Food is rounded and pooled on purpose: I publish my event's P&L, not anyone's product costs.
Full breakdown — attach rates, the sitter, what I'd change — goes up in The Pass this week.
Will your pop-up actually make money? Break-even seats, profit at 60 / 80 / 100% sold, what your time is really worth, and the minimum ticket price to hit your number. Built from the class above.
Free. No signup. Runs on your phone.
A private group for chefs building something of their own. Chef-first. The business behind the food — pricing, deposits, cancellations, filling a room. Not a job board, not a photo wall.
Third generation. My family has supplied Vancouver's kitchens with seafood since 1966, and I've spent twenty years on the supplier side of your walk-in — which is how I know what chefs are good at, and what nobody ever showed them.
The last year I've been interviewing working private chefs about how they actually get booked. I run ticketed events myself and publish the numbers, wins and losses, because that's the only version worth reading.
I'm also building Tableside — a booking and ticketing platform for chefs. I'll always say when I'm talking about it.
Create the event, sell the tickets, manage the room, get paid. Tableside is where the class above was ticketed — and where every chef who runs their numbers here can run the night.
Create your event on Tableside →Free chef account. No storefront required to start.