Live-in chef hire
across Cornwall

No. We do not have a physical office in Cornwall and we do not pretend to. Cornish placements run through our national live-in chef bench, with booking and compliance handled from our Liverpool office. We would rather be honest about the model than fake a Cornish address to win a search-engine click.

For placements of four weeks or longer, we deploy chefs from our national bench who travel to Cornwall with accommodation provided by the venue (live-in staff cottage, holiday park accommodation, or hotel staff room) or arranged through us. The chef stays on site for the duration of the booking, returns home between rotations, and is paid travel-inclusive day rates that include mileage at HMRC rates and a living allowance. This is the standard model for the Cornish summer season (Easter to October) at coastal hotels, country house hotels, holiday parks, and surf-coast restaurant clusters.

For planned bookings of two weeks or more, we confirm a named chef inside 5 working days of brief receipt. For urgent or short-notice cover during peak season (June, July, August) the bench is thin and the realistic window can stretch to 10 working days. We do not commit to same-day or next-day cover in Cornwall. The drive time from Liverpool to Penzance is roughly 7 hours, and from London is roughly 5 hours, so a same-day parachute is not a credible option. We will be honest about this on the call.

St Ives, Padstow, Rock, Newquay, Falmouth, Penzance, Lands End, Truro, Looe, Polperro, Bude, and the wider north coast. For very remote postcodes (Lizard Peninsula, Isles of Scilly), placements are possible for longer bookings but need additional logistics planning. Ring the booking line and we will tell you on the call whether your specific postcode is workable for the season you need.

Every chef we send into a Cornish care home, school, or nursery setting holds Enhanced DBS with the relevant Barred List check before the first shift. Chefs for Cornish coastal hotels, country house hotels, holiday parks, and event sites hold Right to Work, Level 2 Food Safety, and Allergen Awareness as a baseline, with DBS on request for any setting that involves protected adults or children. All Chefs Bay workers are employed on full PAYE, no umbrella companies, no self-employment workarounds.

Yes. Boardmasters in Newquay (early August) and the wider Cornish event calendar are real use cases for the live-in bench. Festival operators booking eight to twelve weeks ahead get the deepest pool. For shorter notice, particularly inside two weeks of the event, the bench is usually committed elsewhere. Our 8-week festival planner walks through what realistic booking timelines look like, including the Cornish coastal hotel surge that runs through the same window.

Because the Cornish chef shortage is a national-bench problem. Cornwall produces a small number of locally-trained chefs relative to the summer demand, and the existing local recruiters draw from a thin pool that is over-subscribed every May to October. The advantage of a national bench plus live-in framing is that we can place a chef from London, Liverpool, or Manchester into a Cornish coastal hotel for a 12-to-16-week summer season, with accommodation arranged. This is how the larger Cornish hotel groups have always staffed: they pay travel and accommodation for the right chef rather than depending on a local pool that is not large enough.