A New Year’s Eve Fire Feast at Home - The Alternative to a Restaurant Booking

The New Year's Eve restaurant booking is a strange ritual. You pay more than any other night of the year, for a fixed menu you did not choose, in a room full of strangers, and at midnight you are either on the pavement looking for a taxi or trapped in the countdown with people you met at nine. More and more people have quietly stopped doing it.

What they do instead is have someone cook at home. The private-chef-at-home market has grown fast in the last few years and New Year's Eve is its busiest night. We do a handful of these every year, and ours come with a fire.

How It Works

You tell us how many people, what you like, and where. We turn up mid-afternoon with the fire, the food and the team. The fire goes up outside: in a garden, a yard, a field, wherever there is space and permission. Guests arrive to the smell of it and a drink by the flames. The food comes off the fire in waves through the evening rather than in three rigid courses, and the last thing off is timed for just before midnight so everyone is outside, by the fire, with a plate, when the year turns.

We clear up. You go to bed. That is the whole offer.

What We Cook

New Year's Eve sits at the heart of game season and the darkest, coldest point of winter, so the food writes itself. A menu from last year, for fourteen in a garden in Lewes:

• By the fire on arrival: cups of hot venison broth; seared venison loin on toast with pickled blackberry; smoked trout on rye
• Through the evening, on boards to the table: a whole goose on the spit, carved at the fire; pheasant breasts pink and the legs slow-cooked in cider; a whole celeriac from the embers; charred sprouts with bacon and chestnut; braised red cabbage; potatoes roasted in the goose fat
• Before midnight: a sticky toffee pudding baked in cast iron in the embers, and a pot of mulled cider that has been warming on the fire since dusk

No two are the same. If you want a whole lamb instead of a goose, or a rib of beef, or a fish buried in salt, that is a conversation. The point is that it is your menu.

At midnight last year there were fourteen people standing round a fire in the dark holding bowls of pudding, and nobody had looked at a phone for an hour. You do not get that in a restaurant at any price.
- Cai

What It Costs

Honestly, usually less than the restaurant. A New Year's Eve set menu in a decent place is well north of £100 a head before drinks, and often a good deal more. A fire feast at home for twelve to twenty people, with a chef and the team, works out at a per-head figure in the same territory, and you are drinking your own wine at your own prices, nobody is being moved on at eleven, and the food was cooked for you rather than for two hundred covers.

Below about ten people it gets expensive, because the fire and the team cost the same whether there are eight of you or eighteen. If you are a smaller group, join forces with another household; it is how most of our best ones happen.

What You Need

• Somewhere for a fire: a patch of garden or yard about four metres square, flat, away from fences and trees. We bring a raised base so nothing touches the ground
• Somewhere to eat: inside is fine, and in December it is sensible. The fire is for cooking and gathering; the table can be in the kitchen
• A word with the neighbours: about the smoke, and about the fact you are not having a bonfire. Most end up coming over

Booking

We take two or three on New Year's Eve itself and they go in November. If you want one, talk to me now rather than in December. And if the date is already gone, the same evening works just as well on any cold night in January, when the game is still at its best and the diary is wide open.