A private chef dinner near Florence, Italy

Villas on the Florentine hills often have kitchens redone for the rental market: a hob that works, a real oven, and room to plate three or four courses without moving anything twice. There are also converted convents and fattorie, where the kitchen is handsome but the extraction is limited, and apartments inside town palazzi, where the dinner works but the arrival needs planning. It varies by property, so we ask for photographs of the kitchen before confirming in all three cases.

For a dinner the questions are different from the ones a class asks. The first is where the food comes out: on these hills the table is very often on a terrace or under a loggia, a floor down or a door along from the kitchen, and that walk gets planned rather than improvised: it decides which courses are plated inside and which are finished beside you. The second is extraction, which in a converted convent or fattoria is usually the weakest thing in an otherwise handsome room: a menu with a seared course is planned around an open door. Neither is an obstacle. Both are asked before anything is confirmed.