Emilly
From R$ 220.00
After years at Unicamp or PUC-Campinas, the formatura deserves better than a generic venue package. A personal chef builds the celebration around the graduate — their favorite dishes, their people, their home.
Formatura packages in Campinas sell the same buffet, the same hall and the same playlist to every graduating class. A personal chef does the opposite: the menu starts with the graduate's story — the strogonoff they grew up on, the ramen they discovered during undergrad, the dish that fueled exam weeks — and turns it into a dinner no venue can replicate.
A spacious house in Swiss Park, Alphaville or Gramado, an apartment in Cambuí, or the family home in Barão Geraldo minutes from Unicamp — Campinas has the rooms and gardens for a graduation party. What families lack is the energy to cook for 25 while hosting. The chef closes that gap, kitchen to cleanup.
Commercial formatura events are notoriously expensive per family. A chef-cooked celebration at home runs R$65–R$230 per person for generous buffets and stations — with better food, real personalization, and no minimum-guest contracts. The savings alone often cover the graduate's first-job wardrobe.
The course and university, the guest count, the venue — family home, Cambuí apartment or a rented chácara in Sousas — and above all the graduate's favorite foods. That is the raw material of the menu.
You receive a proposal: plated courses or stations, a toast moment, and a custom dessert that nods to the diploma. The chef sources everything, from the Mercadão downtown to Valinhos fruit growers.
The chef arrives early, preps, and runs the meal at the party's pace — courses timed around speeches, stations replenished while photos happen, and the champagne moment coordinated with dessert.
When the last guest leaves the table, the kitchen is already being returned to normal. The family keeps the memories and the leftovers — properly packed — and none of the cleanup.
Few Brazilian cities take the formatura as seriously as Campinas. Every year Unicamp and PUC-Campinas send thousands of new engineers, physicians and researchers into the world, and the colação de grau season — concentrated in November and December — fills the city with visiting families and fully booked venues. Hosting at home is not the fallback option here; it is the smarter one.
The settings are ready-made: the family house in Barão Geraldo where the student lived through undergrad, a garden in Swiss Park or Alphaville for a bigger crowd, a Cambuí apartment for an intimate dinner, or a rented chácara in Sousas or Joaquim Egídio for a full-day celebration. A personal chef works in all of them, scaling from a plated dinner for 10 to stations for 40.
Campinas also feeds its chefs well. The century-old Mercado Municipal supplies cheeses, cured meats and spices; Valinhos — Brazil's fig capital — is next door; strawberries come from the Atibaia belt and vegetables from the Holambra cooperative. Seasonal graduation menus built on this pantry taste like the region, not like a rented buffet.
Local Tip
November and December colação weeks are the busiest chef dates of the year in Campinas — book 4 to 6 weeks ahead. A Sunday graduation lunch instead of a dinner often frees up better chefs and lets out-of-town family drive home the same day.
A chef-cooked graduation at home costs well below commercial formatura packages in Campinas, and every real goes into food and service rather than venue rental and middlemen.
R$65–R$230 per person (buffets and stations); R$100–R$400 per person (plated multi-course dinners)
The diploma took years. The celebration takes one booking — a chef, the graduate's favorite menu, and the people who watched it all happen.