The Garden Party CLT: Private Chef, Charlotte NC

The Garden Party is a private chef business in Charlotte, not a cooking school with a storefront. Joanna Adduci Reed founded it. She credits her Italian heritage and early memories of cooking with her grandfather. Her all-female team mostly does in-home meal prep, private dinners and grazing tables. Cooking classes are one of the things you can book them for.

Classes come to you. The team runs them in your home, a vacation rental or a private venue. They design each one around your group, with fresh ingredients and approachable instruction, and you can ask for anything from a beginner lesson to something more ambitious. They do team-building events, kids' classes, birthday parties and evenings with friends. The team plans the menu and buys the ingredients, teaches hands-on and cleans up afterward.

There are no public classes to drop into, and a minimum applies to bookings. The business is ServSafe certified and insured, and it holds a 5-star Google rating from 60 reviews.