Chef Ainsley Rose Thompson

Chef Ainsley was a pleasure to work with from first contact, determining our menu through to dinner prep and service. And the birthday cake was phenomonal. I would absolutely book Chef Ainsley again!

Chef Ainsley was absolutely wonderful, the food was delicious / scrumptious all the amazing adjectives and she made great accommodations for my young niece as well. This was our stand out meal of the trip even better food than our wedding day menu I could not rate highly enough how wonderful the food was.

Incredible meal created for us, could not fault the service or the meal. Highly recommend.

This was our first experience with Take a Chef and certainly won’t be our last. It gets tiring eating out for every meal when traveling. Ainsley made our dinner a very special experience with a beautifully set table, exquisitely presented food and paired wines. I can’t recommend her highly enough.

We cannot recommend Chef Ainsley enough. A delicious New Zealand dinner in the comfort of our rental - tip top food. You can tell she puts her heart and soul into each meal.

Chef Ainsley was very professional, her food was amazing. Highly recommend her for an special event

Our experience was absolutely fantastic, can’t recommend highly enough. Personal touches, great food, amazing service.m, incredible recommendations. It was all perfection.

Chef Ainsley was amazing! She was so friendly and engaging during our entire experience. It felt like we were dining with a friend. Leading up to our trip, she worked closely with us to create the perfect menu for our group. Some were vegetarian, so we had a combination of items to accommodate all. The food was incredible, and we even had many leftovers that we ate again. It was the best meal of our trip. She made our celebratory lunch even better. I highly recommend this experience with Chef Ainsley!

First time using the Chef, I didn't know what to expect. Everyone's expectations were well and truly exceeded. communications were perfect and prompt. Chef was amazing with menu, always offering to change anything. Food was creative, outstanding and especially tasty. Chef was informative, knowledgeable, friendly, polite and respectable. Would highly highly recommend . Thank you thank you for making this family christmas very very special !

Ainsley provided us with a fabulous experience. The food was phenomenal and far exceeded our expectations! Highly recommend.

Wow! It’s hard to know where to start because from start to finish, this was the best private chef experience in our life! I will get to the food, but it must be said that Ainsley is the consummate host, incredibly kind and gracious and exceedingly knowledgeable about all things food (obviously) but also history, geography, culture and industry. Her conversation is an absolute delight and we just loved conversing with her. And boy, does she deliver in the kitchen (and presentation!) of her gastronomical masterpieces! The food took my breath away. The mussels were of the best anywhere, the potatoes were absolutely scrumptious (total crowd pleaser) and the tempura prepared local fish was the best of our lives period. Finally, her rhubarb pavlova actually made me want to cry it was so good. I think the best dessert of recent (and distal) memory! Basically, words aren’t precise enough to describe the divinity that was our first meal in New Zealand ????

Ainsley provided our group of 9 people with an incredible experience. The food she prepared was locally sourced, incredibly fresh and full of flavour. She is clearly a very talented chef, who we were lucky enough to have cook a private dinner for us. Ainsley was also great company and looked after the whole dinner experience (including preparing the table settings and cleaning up). She made sure the whole experience was very special and memorable. I would highly recommend Ainsley to anyone considering having a private chef experience.

Ainsley was absolutely brilliant! We would highly recommend using Ainsley for your next trip to Queenstown!! She went over and above to provide the most amazing experience for our dad’s 60th birthday dinner. We had a 3 course meal and canapés and every dish was incredible. Adding a waitress was also the perfect addition to complete the whole experience. At the end of the service everything was left clean and tidy, you wouldn’t have even known she’d been.

We enjoyed our delicious meal for 6 of us. The food was yum and there was plenty of it - she even left us the left overs! We really loved this as a holiday option.

We engaged Ainsley Rose through Take a Chef, and from the onset she was very attentive to our requirements and came up with a fabulous menu for our small family wedding party. When we made a couple of suggestions, she bent over backwards to include these for us and then went even further. Ainsley presented professionally and had a calm friendly demeanour that all guests enjoyed. The meal was 100%, I could not have wished for better. Having her own table decorations helped to set the scene and the table looked fabulous. Her clean up was miraculous, she was perfect in every way. As you can tell, we give her the highest possible rating in all departments and we will recommend her to all our friends. Thank you Ainsley.

This was such an awesome experience. The food was some of the most delicious I have ever tasted. Chef Ainsley was the first private Chef I have ever had and she was so much better than I had hoped. My group of friends looked over her curated menu and had a hard time choosing what we wanted because everything on there sounded incredible. When I spoke to her about plans we had before dinner, she immediately told me what paired best with the wines we had. We were all watching a movie when we started to smell the food and had to go see what it was and she was more than willing to explain each dish and where the food was sourced from. Only problem I had was not having a large enough stomach to eat everything she made. Do you and your friends a service and book her IMMEDIATELY!

Ainsley was excellent- looked after every detail and the quality of the food was outstanding.

Chef Ainsley bring us a wonderful experience when staying in Queenstown with not only the meal, but also wine pairing. It’s super cozy, and awesome dinner time. Thanks, Chef Ainsley