Private Chefs, Butlersand Bartendersin Marbella

Where we cook on the Costa del Sol

Marbella spreads along the coast and up into the hills behind it, and both matter. We cook on the Golden Mile and around Puerto Banus, in Sierra Blanca and La Zagaleta above the town, across Nueva Andalucia and Los Monteros, and out along the coast to Guadalmina, Estepona and Sotogrande. Inland, Benahavis is fifteen minutes away and full of houses with the best views on the coast.

Villas here are built for outdoor living to a degree that is unusual even in the Mediterranean: outdoor kitchens, covered terraces, and in many cases a barbecue that is a permanent structure rather than a piece of equipment. Tell us it is there. A chef who knows there is live fire outside plans a completely different evening from one who finds out on arrival.

Most people come to this the other way round from how it is usually written: they have taken the house already and want it staffed. That is the normal case here. We put a chef into villas on the Costa del Sol, and where the house and the week call for it a butler and someone behind the bar as well — a villa in La Zagaleta with twelve people in it for a week is a different job from a dinner for six above Puerto Banus. If you are still choosing the house, tell us which ones you are looking at: the kitchen and the terrace decide more about the week than the number of bedrooms does.

What Andalusia gives us

The coast supplies the obvious things well: boquerones, red prawns from Motril and Garrucha, and the small fried fish that Malaga does better than anywhere. Espeto, sardines skewered on a cane and cooked over open fire, is the local dish worth doing properly at a villa rather than badly at a restaurant.

Behind the coast the Serrania gives Iberian pork and cured ham, the olive oil is some of the best in Spain, and Ronda makes wine that almost nobody outside Andalusia has tried. There is a full menu here that is neither hotel Mediterranean nor tapas cliche, and it is what we would rather cook.

A longer season than most

Marbella works nearly all year, which is unusual among our destinations. July and August are the peak and the hardest weeks to arrange, but the shoulder months are genuinely warm, and Easter and the weeks either side of Christmas are busy in their own right.

For stays of a week or more with the same chef every day, high summer is the period that needs months of notice. Outside it, the coast can usually be arranged in days.

Getting in, and getting around

Most of the houses we cook in are inside gated urbanisations — La Zagaleta, Sierra Blanca, Los Monteros, Guadalmina — and a gate that does not have your chef's name on the list does not open, no matter who is expecting them. We ask for it when the booking is confirmed, and it is the single most common reason a first evening starts late anywhere on this coast.

Then the road. Everything runs along one coast, so San Pedro to Sotogrande is forty minutes on a good day and considerably more in August. A chef cooking for you in Estepona does the shopping in Estepona, not in Marbella. And dinner here is Spanish: nine or later is normal, the table sits down after the light has gone, and the kitchen plans backwards from that rather than from a seven o'clock service.