The Italian Banquet Company caters week-long residencies at private-hire houses across Scotland, and Kinblethmont House — a country manor set in its own grounds near Arbroath, in Angus — is one of the places that shows what that really means. Not a single dinner. A whole week of them, cooked on site, for a family who had taken the house for a milestone celebration and wanted to be fed properly every day they were in it.
There is a particular kind of cooking that only happens when you stop being a supplier who arrives, serves and leaves, and become, for a few days, the kitchen of the house. That is what a residency is. You move in. You learn the oven. You find out which window the morning light comes through and where the good knives end up. And then you cook — breakfast to dinner, day after day — for people who slowly stop being clients and start being the family you happen to be feeding.
A House That Asks to Be Cooked In
Kinblethmont is the sort of Angus house that was built for gathering. High-ceilinged rooms, a long table that wants to be laid, grounds that go quiet at dusk. A family had come from abroad to mark a milestone birthday together, and they had taken the whole house for the week so that nobody had to leave at the end of the night. That changes the cooking entirely. When the guests are also the residents, dinner isn't an event with a finish line — it's the heart of a holiday, and it has to be wonderful every single evening without ever repeating itself.
The Rhythm of a Week
A residency has a rhythm a one-off dinner never does. The first day is reconnaissance — the kitchen, the suppliers within reach, the morning trip for what's freshest that day. By the second evening you've found the pace of the house. By midweek you're cooking around the people: the early risers, the one who loves a long lunch, the children who appear hopefully at the kitchen door. You build the menus forward across the days so that nothing is served twice and each dinner has somewhere to go — lighter one night, a proper feast the next, something quiet and restorative after a big day out.
That is the real luxury of taking a house like Kinblethmont with a chef in it. Not extravagance for its own sake — just the deep comfort of never thinking about food, of walking into a room that already smells of dinner, of a week where every meal simply happens, beautifully, around you.
Cooking for People, Not Covers
By the end of a week you know how everyone takes their coffee. You know who'll come back for seconds of the pasta and who's secretly waiting for dessert. You cook differently when you know people that well — a little more generously, a little more for them and less for the menu card. The milestone dinner at the centre of the week becomes the easy crescendo of something you've been building toward all along, rather than a performance for strangers.
When we packed up at the end of the week, the house went quiet in that particular way a house does when a good week is over. That is the work we love most: not arriving to impress and leaving, but moving in, learning a house and a family, and cooking our way through a week until the food has become part of the memory of the place.
Giuseppe Manzoli is the founder and head chef of The Italian Banquet Company, cooking weddings, residencies and private celebrations at country houses and private-hire venues across Angus, Tayside and the rest of Scotland — a full chef's brigade that comes to you and cooks on site.