A private hibachi chef service on 30A

This business exists because of one gap in how people holiday on 30A. Groups rent enormous houses with enormous decks, and then spend their evenings trying to get a table for fourteen at a restaurant built for four. The houses are the best rooms on the coast and almost nobody eats in them.

So we cook there instead. Same food you would queue for, in the place you are already paying for, at the hour you actually want to eat. The show is the part people book for and the logistics are the part they thank us for afterwards.

This is a private hibachi chef service, which is to say hibachi catering that happens at your address rather than ours. We bring the flat-top grill, the fuel and the food, cook in front of your group, and take all of it away again. The table, the chairs, the plates and the utensils are yours, or ours for $12 a head if you would rather not think about them. Your kitchen is never used either way.

The two occasions the service is built around are a bachelorette party, where the group is often 12 to 16 and no restaurant on this road will seat them together at short notice, and a birthday, where the cooking is the entertainment rather than a break from it. Reunions, rehearsal dinners and corporate nights are variations on the same evening.

The date and the hour are yours. We cook when you actually want to eat, which is most of the reason people book a chef instead of a table.

We cook right along 30A and the wider Emerald Coast, and 25 of those towns have a page of their own: Alys Beach, Blue Mountain Beach, Camp Creek, Carillon Beach, Destin, Dune Allen Beach, Fort Walton Beach, Grayton Beach, Gulf Place, Inlet Beach, Laguna Beach, Lake Powell, Miramar Beach, Okaloosa Island, Panama City Beach, Point Washington, Prominence, Rosemary Beach, Sandestin, Santa Rosa Beach, Seacrest Beach, Seagrove Beach, Seaside, WaterColor and WaterSound. There is no travel fee anywhere on 30A.

Knowing that a Seaside porch roof is too low but a WaterColor one might not be. Knowing that the carriage-house drive is the best surface on a Rosemary Beach property, that an Alys courtyard with a plunge pool will not fit a grill and a serving station, that a Blue Mountain driveway pitches too steeply to be safe, and that the single most common cause of a late start in WaterSound is a gate code nobody sent.

None of that is on a menu. All of it is the difference between a dinner that runs and a dinner that gets solved on your deck while your guests watch.

Heat mats under the grill on every surface, a drop cloth around it, and a full breakdown at the end: station bagged, surface wiped, rubbish gone. Your kitchen is not used at any point in the evening.

Rental houses on 30A change hands every week and their owners are not present. Leaving the deck exactly as we found it is not a courtesy, it is the job.