Live-in chef hire
across the Highlands

No. We do not have a physical office anywhere in Scotland. Highland and Inverness placements are made through our national live-in chef bench, with booking and compliance run from our Liverpool office. We would rather be straight about the serving model than fake a Highland address to please a search engine.

For placements of four weeks or longer, we deploy chefs from our national bench who travel to the Highlands with accommodation provided by you (lodge bunkroom, staff cottage, or estate accommodation) or arranged through us. The chef stays on site for the full 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 staffing model for Highland sporting lodges (August to October game season), country house hotels (May to October peak), and Cairngorms ski resorts (December to March).

For planned bookings of two weeks or more, we confirm a named chef inside 5 working days of brief receipt for most Highland venues, longer for very remote postcodes (Outer Hebrides, Northern Sutherland) where transport logistics are themselves the bottleneck. We do not commit to same-day or next-day cover in the Highlands. If a head chef walks out of a country house hotel on a Friday before a Saturday wedding service, we cannot parachute a Liverpool chef into Inverness on the same day. We will be honest about this on the call.

Inverness, Loch Ness, Aviemore and the Cairngorms (PH22, PH26), Fort William, Speyside (the AB and IV postcodes around the whisky trail), Royal Deeside (Ballater, Braemar), the Isle of Skye, and Argyll and the west coast (PA postcodes including Oban, Mull, and Islay). Outer Hebrides and far north Sutherland 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.

Scotland uses PVG rather than DBS for protected adult and child work. Every chef we send into a Scottish care home, school, or nursery setting holds either current PVG or the Disclosure Scotland equivalent before the first shift. Chefs for Highland country house hotels, distilleries, sporting lodges, and event sites hold Right to Work, Level 2 Food Safety, and Allergen Awareness as a baseline, with PVG on request for any setting that involves protected adults or children. All Chefs Bay workers are employed on full PAYE.

Yes. The Highland sporting estate calendar (12 August grouse season opening, stalking through September and October, plus ghillie and lodge guest catering) is a real use case for the live-in bench. The same applies to Speyside Whisky Festival in May, distillery visitor centres throughout the year, and country house weddings May to September. Operators booking eight to twelve weeks ahead get the deepest bench. For shorter notice, we will tell you on the call what is realistic.

Because Highland chef shortage is a Scotland-wide problem, not a regional sourcing problem. Established Scottish recruiters (Chefs in Scotland, Global Highland, Adkins Cheurfi, Platinum Hospitality) draw from the same Scottish chef bench, which is too thin in peak season for the demand. The advantage of a national bench plus live-in framing is that we can place a Liverpool, Manchester, or London-based chef into a Highland lodge for a 12-week season, then send them home, then send a different chef on rotation. This is how the largest country house and sporting estate groups have always staffed: they pay travel and accommodation for the right chef rather than depending on a local pool that does not exist at the scale they need.