Learn to cook, improve your culinary skills, or plan a fantastic private event with Chef Joel

Chef Joel offers a wide range of fantastic special events for both personal and professional occasions.  Our custom private culinary events bring people together over delicious food.  Whether your goal is to celebrate a family occasion, entertain VIP clients, impress your friends & neighbors, create a more cohesive corporate team, or just enjoy learning how to cook a delicious bespoke meal, we offer fun, educational, and diverse opportunities to do this in creative, memorable ways.  Hemmachef / Chef Joel Olson can provide on-site and off-site private event services for:

• Corporate Culinary Events
• Private Culinary Events
• Presentations
• Children’s Cooking Parties
• Other Children’s Culinary Events, including Girl Scout Badge Workshops
  

Chef Joel enjoys sharing his culinary expertise through presentations/public speaking and media appearances and has extensive experience in this area.  Whether he presents at a local library, at a national conference, on a television program, or to a home-schooling group, Chef Joel hopes to inspire everyone to become better cooks.

Chef Joel has made regular appearances on radio shows, especially on WPR’s Larry Meiller Show, where he has discussed his love of cooking fish and wild game, especially locally-harvested game from WI.  His last appearance with Larry was on May 4, 2026.  Here is the audio from this appearance.  While he will miss chatting with Larry after his retirement, Chef Joel looks forward continuing to work with Wisconsin Public Radio to share his love of cooking wild game and fish.  You can find the audio of all of Chef Joel’s appearances thru the Larry Meiller Show links.  Chef Joel has also made regular TV appearances on Madison’s Channel 27 “Wake Up Wisconsin” as well as on WISC-TV and stations in the DC area.  He was highlighted in a Channel 3000 feature on his “Slava Ukraini!” Fundraising Dinner for World Central Kitchen’s Chefs for Ukraine Initiative.

Chef Joel serves as the Culinary Director for “At Home with Christy Rost,” on the Eat This TV Network featuring PBS Chef Christy Rost.  The show is filmed in Chef Christy’s beautiful kitchen in her historic Breckenridge home “Swans Nest” and is currently available on several streaming services.  You can see some pictures of the filming of Season 1 and of Chef Joel hard at work here.  Season 2 was filmed in August 2023, and Season 3 was filmed in August 2024.  Both are available to stream (more information here).  Chef Joel enjoyed another action-packed week of filming for Season 4 in beautiful Breckenridge in July, 2025.

The WI State Journal has featured Chef Joel’s epic culinary events, including his annual Wild Game Feed, which combines his love of hunting & fishing with his classical culinary training for gourmet fish & game dishes.  The Isthmus and Madison Magazine have featured Chef Joel’s classes: “Bourbon & Beef” and sumptuous wine dinners.  Chef Joel can present information about a wide variety of culinary topics to almost any audience.