Nobody wants to
organise dinner on night four.
Booking sixteen people into restaurants every evening is a part-time job, and self-catering for that many turns two people into kitchen staff for the week. This is the third option, and it is usually the reason a group books the trip rather than just the house.
A chef comes to the house
Not a caterer delivering trays. A chef who shops, cooks in the kitchen and puts it on the long table while you are still talking. You can have full board — breakfast, lunch, dinner, every day — or just the dinners, which is what most groups choose, keeping breakfast loose and lunch out.
Dietary requirements go in the same list as the bed plan, before you arrive. It is a great deal easier to plan around a coeliac and two vegetarians in advance than to discover them at seven o'clock on the first night.
There are two kitchens. That sounds like a detail and is actually the whole trick: a chef works downstairs while your group keeps using the one upstairs. Nobody is exiled from the coffee machine because dinner is being prepared.
One table, not four
Booking a large group into a restaurant usually means being split across tables, or seated in a side room, or eating at half past nine because that was the only slot. Here everyone eats in one place at a time you chose — which matters more than the food does, because the conversation that makes the week is the one that happens when nobody has to shout across an aisle.
Groups still go out, and should. Lisbon is fifteen minutes away and worth an evening. The difference is that going out becomes a choice rather than a nightly logistics problem.
What it does to the week
The honest reason to do this is not the cooking. It is that nobody in your group becomes staff. No supermarket runs, no rota, no two people quietly missing the afternoon because they are peeling things. On a self-catered week for sixteen, someone always ends up doing that, and it is usually the same person who organised the trip.
Chefs also over-cater, reliably. One group of thirteen had so much left they ate it again the next day and gave the rest to the cleaning team. Nobody has ever told us there was not enough.
What we will tell you plainly
The chefs are not ours — nothing here is except the house. They are people we have worked with and would put in front of our own family, booked and paid through us so you deal with one team and one invoice. We have had a chef no-show once, booked directly by a guest through a third-party platform; a replacement cooked the following day. When we book, we carry that problem, not you.
Catering is quoted per person per day so it scales with your numbers rather than surprising you — the cost picture is here.
Tell us your dates, your numbers, and how you like to eat.
You will get a per-person day rate back, with the dietary list already accounted for.