Ibiza

Ten weeks of the year Ibiza hosts more private dinners per head than anywhere in the Mediterranean, and the island’s chefs have built a trade around fincas with no kitchen and guests who arrive at eleven.

Ibiza has an unusual trade: a dozen serious private chefs, a hundred competent ones, and ten weeks in which to earn the year. They cook in fincas where the kitchen is a domestic stove beside a cistern, so the island standard is a prep tent behind the house, gas rings, a cold box and a plating table under a lamp. Hosts who have only hired chefs in cities are surprised by how much equipment arrives and how little of the house kitchen gets used.

Prices track the season steeply. The same chef is 550 euros a day in June and 900 in the first week of August, and a villa that wants breakfast, lunch and dinner for twelve for a week will be quoted 9,000 to 16,000 euros plus food. Produce is the weak point: almost all vegetables come by ferry, so a menu built on island fish, salt, herbs, figs and the grill eats better and costs less than one that demands out of season imports.

The format that works here is the long table at dusk: cold raw opening, a grilled fish or lamb in the middle, fruit and a hard cheese at the end, all of it able to wait twenty minutes while the guests watch the sun disappear. The format that fails is the precise plated tasting menu, because Ibizan dinners do not start on time and no brigade in the world can hold eight courses for an hour in the heat.