Key Takeaways
TL;DR: For the 2026 Met Gala, four Take a Chef chefs created art-inspired menus available from April 21 to May 6, 2026: Henry Rivera’s Van Gogh menu, Natasha Gomez’s Basquiat menu, Robert Ritchie’s Schiaparelli menu and Filippo Caporaso’s tasting in four acts. The collection has closed, but the chefs can still be booked.
- The idea: At the Met Gala, the dinner has become part of the show, with chefs translating an exhibition’s theme into flavor and color. The collection brought that spirit to private homes, with each menu conceived as a tribute to an artist.
- A Night in Provence: Henry Rivera’s four-course menu, inspired by Vincent van Gogh, included a Golden Fields risotto, a Midnight Garden Caesar, Provençal harvest lamb and a Velvet Night cheesecake, at $180 per guest.
- The Crown Collection: Natasha Gomez’s menu, inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Haitian culinary heritage, featured accra, soup joumou, guinea fowl and pain patate, at $225 per guest, with 50 collectible menus.
- Schiaparelli and four acts: Robert Ritchie’s six-course menu for Daniel Roseberry’s Schiaparelli ran from caviar and oysters to surf and turf and a chocolate soufflé at $258 per guest, and Filippo Caporaso’s four-act tasting moved from Dalí and Klimt to Bernini, Michelangelo and Magritte at $160 per guest.
- Booking the chefs now: The menus were offered only between April 21 and May 6, 2026 and won’t return in this form, but all four chefs are still on Take a Chef, where a booking includes groceries, service and cleanup.
From April 21 to May 6, 2026, four of our chefs opened a strictly limited collection of private dining experiences — each one a tribute to an artist, each one available only while the Gala's window was open.
Every first Monday of May, the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art become the most photographed staircase in the world. The gowns, the jewels, the choreography of arrivals — they dominate the headlines the next morning. But beyond the carpet, inside the museum, another ceremony is unfolding in near silence: the one at the table.
The Met Gala has always been understood as fashion treated as art. What fewer people talk about is that, over the last decade, its dining room has quietly become a canvas in its own right — a place where chefs are asked not simply to feed a crowd of several hundred, but to translate an exhibition's theme into flavor, color, and gesture. The menu is no longer a formality slid between the arrivals and the after-party. It is part of the show.
In spring 2026, we wanted to bring that same spirit somewhere more intimate: your own dining room.
Índice
Where Food Meets Art
To cook a menu for a night like the Met Gala is, in a sense, to read a curatorial brief. The chef studies the exhibition notes. They look at the palette of the artists on display, the silhouettes on the carpet, the cultural references being invoked by the designers dressing the room. And then, quietly, they begin to reverse-engineer a dinner from all of it — a plate of saffron and deep indigo because those were the colors of the painter in Gallery Three; a dessert that echoes a brushstroke; a single ingredient borrowed from a painter's home country and allowed, for one course, to carry the whole evening.
It is food treated as gesture rather than garnish. The Gala's table is one of the very few places in the world where a chef is asked, for one night, to be something between cook and curator — and to accept that the work will be eaten, not hung.
The four experiences in the collection below were built in exactly that register. Each one is a tribute, not a menu. And each was designed to be cooked in the most intimate room any of us has: a private home.
An Exclusive Collection, April 21 – May 6, 2026
Aligned with the Met Gala on May 4, Take a Chef opened a small, rigorously curated collection of art-inspired dining experiences. Four menus, four chefs, four artists. These were not adaptations of existing offerings — they were new work, conceived for the occasion, available only on a strictly limited basis. When the window closed on May 6, they closed with it.
Below, the four chefs, and the worlds they built for the collection.
Chef Henry Rivera — "A Night in Provence"
Inspired by Vincent van Gogh
Van Gogh's Provence is a country of yellow light and cobalt skies, of olive groves that bend under the mistral and fields that seem to hold their own warmth after the sun has gone. Chef Henry Rivera has translated that landscape into a four-course menu that eats like a painting caught at dusk — generous, luminous, and, by the end, quietly nocturnal.
Highlights
- Golden Fields Risotto
- Midnight Garden Caesar
- Provençal Harvest Lamb
- Velvet Night Cheesecake
Price $180 per guest
Availability April 21 – May 6, 2026 (now closed)
Chef Natasha Gomez — "The Crown Collection"
Inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat
Basquiat painted crowns above his figures as declarations of sovereignty — reminders that genius needs no permission. Chef Natasha Gomez takes that impulse and runs it through the culinary heritage of Haiti, building a menu that is at once riotous and deeply rooted: Neo-Expressionist on the surface, ancestral underneath. The soup joumou alone — the symbolic dish of Haitian independence — makes this one of the most personal menus in the collection.
Highlights
- Artisanal Accra Spheres
- Heritage Soup Joumou
- Grand Guinea Fowl "Radiant Child"
- Pain Patate Dessert
Price $225 per guest
Availability 50 collectible menus, April 21 – May 6, 2026 (now closed)
Wine pairing Curated sommelier selection, purchased separately
Chef Robert Ritchie — Light and Fresh Bold Flavors with Spring Colors
Inspired by Daniel Roseberry (Schiaparelli)
Daniel Roseberry's Schiaparelli is couture reimagined as sculpture — surreal, exacting, unapologetically maximalist. Chef Robert Ritchie's answer is a six-course menu that matches that precision with the luminosity of early spring: caviar, oysters, scallop, salmon — ingredients chosen for their clarity and built up in layers that read, course after course, like a runway in motion.
Highlights
- Caspian Sea Caviar Service with Bellinis
- Oysters with Green Peppercorn Champagne Mignonette
- Sea Scallop Crudo with Seaweed Frisée
- Surf and Turf with Filet Mignon & Jumbo Prawns
- Vanilla Butter Poached Scottish Salmon
- Warm Dark Chocolate Soufflé with Dulce de Leche Cream
Price $258 per guest
Availability April 21 – May 6, 2026 (now closed)
Chef Filippo Caporaso — "Between Dream and Stone"
An Artistic Tasting in Four Acts
Of the four experiences in the collection, Chef Filippo Caporaso's is perhaps the most theatrical — a tasting menu built as a play in four acts, each borrowed from a different master. It is meant to be eaten slowly, and in order. Surrealism gives way to gilded opulence; opulence gives way to the quiet monumentality of sculpture; and the final course, under Magritte, turns the whole evening on its head: what you see, by design, is not quite what you taste.
Highlights
Price $160 per guest
Availability April 21 – May 6, 2026 (now closed)
How the Experience Works
The experience itself was designed to be as considered as the menus, and booking a private chef on Take a Chef still works the same way. You browse the chefs, choose the one whose vision speaks loudest to you, and reserve directly through Take a Chef. On the evening itself, you welcome the chef into your home, and from that moment the night is theirs to stage. Groceries, service, cleanup — all of it included. For a few hours, you are simply a guest at your own table.
After the Window Closed
The collection was deliberately small, and the window was narrow. Between April 21 and May 6, 2026, these four menus existed as a set; after that, they dissolved back into each chef's private practice and will not be offered again in this form. The four chefs are still on Take a Chef: their profiles are linked above. If you have ever wondered what the Met Gala would taste like — not as spectacle, but as an evening — this was the closest anyone has come to answering.
