Private Chef · Corsicana, TX
Le Cordon Bleu trained, cum laude. 21 years in professional kitchens — Walt Disney World, Great Wolf Lodge, Compass Group. Ten industry awards. One chef, every time: dinner parties, weekly meal prep, events and holiday catering across Navarro County and the Dallas–Fort Worth corridor.
Reply within 24 hrs · 469-635-8303 · thechefnaycox@gmail.com
21
Years in pro kitchens
2006
Le Cordon Bleu, cum laude
10
Industry awards, 2011–2026
120
Recipes published in print
What I cook for you
Three to five courses plated in your kitchen for 2–20 guests. Shopping, service and full cleanup included — you host, I run the pass.
FROM $95 / GUEST
Five to fourteen meals a week, cooked fresh, labeled and dated. Macro targets, diabetic-friendly, kid-approved — built around how your household actually eats.
FROM $375 / WEEK
Engagements, showers, graduations, corporate dinners and lake-house weekends. Front-of-house staffing available through Clever Chef Industries.
FROM $55 / GUEST
Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter and Juneteenth — drop-off trays or full-service in your home. Books out early; holiday dates open in August.
FROM $350 DROP-OFF
Hands-on sessions for couples, families and teens: knife skills, roux and Cajun fundamentals, Southern technique done properly.
FROM $250 / SESSION
Tell me the occasion, the date and the headcount. I'll write you a menu and a quote.
START AN INQUIRY →Why Nay
Most private-chef bookings in this market run through an aggregator — a different cook each time, a call center between you and your kitchen. I'm the opposite of that. You hire me: the chef who trained at Le Cordon Bleu, opened kitchens for Disney and Great Wolf Lodge, currently runs Tejun the Texas Cajun in Red Oak, and founded Clever Chef Industries here in Corsicana.
That means one point of contact, one palate, one standard — plus a published book of 120 recipes behind the food you're served.
Read the full story →Where I cook
Home base is Corsicana. I cook the whole I-45 corridor between here and Dallas — the stretch most chefs won't drive.
Home turf. Dinner parties on Beaton Street, Lake Halbert gatherings, weeknight meal prep.
Kerens, Rice, Blooming Grove, Frost, Dawson and the Richland Chambers lake houses.
Uptown, Lakewood, Bishop Arts, Highland Park and the Design District lofts.
Also serving Waxahachie · Red Oak · Ennis · Palmer · Fort Worth — ask about your city.
In clients' words
She cooked a five-course anniversary dinner in our kitchen and we never saw a dish. The seafood course alone was worth the whole night.
Weekly prep changed our house. Ten meals every Sunday, all inside my husband's diabetic numbers, and the kids eat it without arguing.
We'd used a booking app twice and got a different cook each time. Chef Nay showed up herself, remembered our allergies, and raised the bar.
Off the pass
Tell me the occasion and headcount — you'll get a menu proposal and a flat quote, no marketplace markup.
Services
Every booking is priced flat — food cost, shopping, labor, service and cleanup in one number, quoted before I ever step in your kitchen. Licensed, insured and food-manager certified through Clever Chef Industries. Starting prices below include food, shopping and labor; your final number depends on menu, headcount and travel.
STARTING AT $95 PER GUEST
A restaurant tasting menu, served at your table. I plan the menu with you, source the protein and produce myself, cook on site, plate each course, and leave the kitchen cleaner than I found it.
STARTING AT $375 PER WEEK · 10 MEALS
A standing day each week: I shop, cook in your kitchen or mine, and stock your fridge with meals portioned, labeled and dated with heating instructions.
STARTING AT $55 PER GUEST
Engagement dinners, showers, graduations, retirement parties, corporate client dinners, lake-house weekends and small weddings — from 10 to 150 guests, buffet or coursed.
STARTING AT $350 DROP-OFF
Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Juneteenth and Super Bowl spreads. Drop-off trays with reheat cards, or I stay and serve.
STARTING AT $250 PER SESSION
Two hours in your kitchen with a Le Cordon Bleu graduate. Couples' date-night classes, family sessions, teen basics, or a single technique you want to finally get right.
STAFFING
Servers $45 per hour, per person, four-hour minimum. Bartenders $55 per hour. Booked through Clever Chef Industries and added to your quote — parties over ten usually want at least one server.
DEPOSIT & TRAVEL
A $50 non-refundable deposit confirms your date and comes off the balance. No travel fee inside Corsicana; everywhere else is one flat travel line, disclosed before you commit.
COMMON QUESTIONS
Equipment, cleanup, alcohol, allergies, kitchens that worry you — answered in full.
Read the FAQ →Send the occasion, date and headcount. I'll recommend the format and quote it.
Sample experiences
Starting points, not a fixed list — every menu gets rewritten around your season, your market and your table. Dietary restrictions are designed for, never worked around.
TWO GUESTS · FOUR COURSES
Chilled Gulf shrimp cocktail
Charred lemon, horseradish crème, pickled celery
Roasted beet & goat cheese
Candied pecan, sorghum vinaigrette, baby arugula
Filet, bordelaise, pommes purée
The dish that won Best Steaks in DFW — brown butter asparagus
Bourbon bread pudding
Vanilla bean anglaise, burnt sugar
8–20 GUESTS · PASSED + THREE COURSES
Passed: crab beignets, deviled eggs, boudin bites
Remoulade, hot honey, pickled mustard seed
Seafood gumbo, dark roux
Carolina gold rice, filé, green onion — Best Seafood, 2025
Cast-iron catfish or braised short rib
Stone-ground grits, collard chowchow, red wine jus
Brown butter cookie plate
The 2024 Best Cookie, three ways
10–40 GUESTS · FAMILY STYLE
Cajun-brined smoked turkey
Pan gravy, cranberry-jalapeño relish
Honey-glazed ham or prime rib
Creole mustard, horseradish cream
The sides table
Cornbread dressing, smoked gouda mac, candied yams, green beans with bacon lardon
Sweet potato pie & peach cobbler
Whipped crème fraîche
HOUSEHOLD OF FOUR · TEN MEALS
Herb-roasted chicken, dirty rice, broccolini
610 cal · 48g protein
Blackened salmon, quinoa pilaf, haricots verts
Omega-forward, low sodium
Turkey étouffée over cauliflower rice
Diabetic-friendly, 22g net carbs
Kid plate: chicken tenders, sweet potato, ranch
Scratch breading, air-fryer reheat card
Sourcing. Gulf seafood, Texas beef, and produce bought the morning of the event.
Dietary. Gluten-free, dairy-free, halal, vegan, diabetic and allergy menus built from scratch.
The book. Many of these dishes appear in Young and Dumb: A Chef's Guide to Greatness — 120 recipes.
About the chef
I graduated cum laude from Le Cordon Bleu Culinary Institute in 2006 and have spent the twenty-one years since inside real kitchens — Walt Disney World, Great Wolf Lodge, Compass Group, and a run of opening-chef roles across Dallas–Fort Worth where I built menus, trained brigades and turned on the lights day one.
Today I'm General Manager at Tejun the Texas Cajun in Red Oak, and founder and CEO of Clever Chef Industries — a multi-brand hospitality company headquartered in Corsicana. Private chef work is where all of that comes home: the technique of a fine-dining line, the discipline of a corporate kitchen, served at a table where people know each other.
I wrote Young and Dumb: A Chef's Guide to Greatness — 120 recipes and the hard lessons behind them — and illustrated Granny Says: The First Day of Kindergarten. My leadership work lives under the Green Onion Philosophy: the humble ingredient that finishes every plate, and the belief that whoever cooks the food is responsible for how the room feels.
When you book me, you get me. Not a roster, not a rotating contractor from an app — the same chef, learning your family's palate a little better each visit.
Press & recognition
Awards from 2011 to 2026, across food, leadership and community. Not a single one came from a marketplace profile.
Best Steaks in DFW
Best New Dining
Best Leader Award
Hero Award
Inspiring Us All
Best Cookie
Community Sponsorship Award
Best Catfish
Best Seafood Restaurant
Best Outdoor Dining
Young and Dumb: A Chef's Guide to Greatness — 120 recipes plus the kitchen lessons behind them. Available at greenonionphilosophy.com. Also illustrator of Granny Says: The First Day of Kindergarten.
Green Onion Philosophy — talks and writing on kitchen leadership, culture and developing young cooks. Best Leader Award, 2016; Hero Award, 2017.
Interviews, demos and features: thechefnaycox@gmail.com. High-resolution photography and bio available on request.
Corsicana, Texas · 75110
Corsicana is home. I live here, my company is headquartered here, and until now this town had no dedicated private chef — just directory listings and drive-in caterers from Dallas. If you want a Le Cordon Bleu–trained chef cooking a coursed dinner in your own kitchen on West Second Avenue, that's a fifteen-minute drive for me, not a road trip.
Book a Corsicana dateAnniversary dinners in the historic homes off Beaton Street. Birthday parties at Lake Halbert. Client dinners for the oil, insurance and medical offices downtown. Weekly meal prep for families running between Navarro College classes and Friday-night football at Tiger Stadium.
I shop local first — produce from area growers, and dessert conversations that inevitably start with Collin Street Bakery. Fundraisers and Pioneer Village events get catering-scale service with the same plating standard.
CORSICANA BOOKING NOTES
Just outside town? I cover the rest of the county and the corridor north.
Navarro County, Texas
Kerens, Rice, Blooming Grove, Frost, Dawson, Angus, Emhouse, Powell, Mildred, Barry, Richland. County living means the good restaurants are forty minutes away and the caterers want a metro minimum. I bring the kitchen to you — whether that's a ranch house outside Dawson or a weekend place on Richland Chambers.
Check county availabilityRichland Chambers Reservoir cabins and Navarro Mills gatherings: Friday-night seafood boil, Saturday coursed dinner, Sunday brunch — groceries, cooking and cleanup handled so nobody leaves the dock.
Rehearsal dinners and small weddings at county venues where the "kitchen" is a prep table and two outlets. I've opened restaurants from concrete floors up — I can cook anywhere, and I bring what the site lacks.
Standing weekly drops to Kerens, Rice, Blooming Grove and Frost. Ten meals, labeled and dated, built around harvest schedules, shift work and school pickup lines.
Navarro County has no shortage of good cooks — it has a shortage of trained ones you can hire for a night. Twenty-one years of professional kitchens, one county, one chef who actually lives here.
Dallas–Fort Worth · I-45 corridor
I spent years opening kitchens across this metroplex before I ever cooked in someone's home here. Uptown high-rises, Lakewood dining rooms, Highland Park dinner parties, Bishop Arts birthdays, Design District lofts and Deep Ellum studio events — plus the corridor south through Red Oak, Waxahachie, Ennis and Palmer that most Dallas chefs treat as out of range.
Request a Dallas dateDallas has plenty of private chefs, and most of the search results are marketplaces reselling whoever is free. You book me directly: one chef, one quote, one person answering the email — with Disney-scale and Compass Group operations behind the technique, and a Best Steaks in DFW award from when I was running a line here.
Corporate client dinners, investor entertaining, holiday parties, birthday and engagement dinners, and recurring weekly prep for households in Uptown, Preston Hollow and Lake Highlands.
CORRIDOR COVERAGE
Travel is quoted flat by distance and disclosed in the proposal — no surprise line items.
Book Chef Nay
Three quick steps. You'll hear back within 24 hours with a menu direction and a flat quote.
Prefer to talk? Call or text 469-635-8303.
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BASED IN
814 1/2 West 11th Avenue, Corsicana, TX 75110 — serving Navarro County & DFW
LEAD TIME
7+ days preferred · holidays book months out
Questions
The things people ask me on the first phone call. Anything not covered here — call or text 469-635-8303.
Seven days is comfortable for a dinner party or a first week of meal prep, and same-week dates open up regularly around Corsicana. Holidays are the exception — Thanksgiving and Christmas go on the calendar in August and fill fast.
A $50 non-refundable deposit confirms your date once you accept the quote, and it comes off your final balance. Inquiring and getting a proposal cost nothing.
I arrive with knives, pans, small equipment and plating tools. I use your range, oven and refrigerator — anything your kitchen is missing comes with me from my commercial kitchen in Corsicana.
Yes, and it is already in the quote. Dishes done, surfaces wiped, trash out. You should not be able to tell dinner was cooked there.
Yes. Gluten-free, dairy-free, halal, vegan, diabetic, heart-healthy and allergy menus get designed from scratch rather than adapted. Put it on the inquiry form and the proposal is built around it.
Yes, staffed through Clever Chef Industries. Servers run $45 per hour per person with a four-hour minimum; bartenders are $55 per hour. Parties over ten guests usually want at least one server.
No — you buy the wine and spirits. I will write pairing notes and a shopping list for your menu, and a licensed bartender can pour on the night.
No travel fee inside Corsicana city limits. Navarro County, the I-45 corridor and Dallas–Fort Worth are quoted as one flat travel line, disclosed in the proposal before you commit.
Almost certainly. I have cooked coursed dinners out of apartment galleys, lake-house kitchens and barn venues with a prep table and two outlets. Send a photo with your inquiry if you are unsure.
Yes — licensed, insured and food-manager certified through Clever Chef Industries, working out of a commercial kitchen here in Corsicana.
The $50 deposit holds the date; the balance is due the day of service. Accepted payment methods are listed on your proposal.
Move it with more than seven days' notice and your deposit follows you to the new date. Inside seven days the deposit is forfeited, since the food has usually been bought.
Still deciding? Send the date and headcount and I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right fit.
Start an inquiry