GIVEAWAY TIME! Enter Today.
Dreaming of hosting a cozy French dinner in your own home? Now’s your chance! We’re giving one lucky winner 10% OFF their next private dining experience with Chef Francis.
Giveaway ends July 26 at 12:00 p.m. The winner will be announced on our social media shortly after. Available for private dining events throughout New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania.
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Bonne chance!
There is something wonderfully rebellious about celebrating Christmas in July. No snow, no scarves, no marathon shopping trips under fluorescent lights — just the warmth of genuine gathering, the pleasure of an exceptional table, and the rare permission to feel festive when the calendar says you have no business doing so. On the East Coast, that permission has been enthusiastically accepted.
Where It All Began
Written by Debra Malota · Chef Francis
The idea of Christmas in July has been around for centuries. The phrase first appears in a French opera that debuted in 1892 — fitting, perhaps, that a tradition now embraced by fine dining culture has its literary roots in the French artistic tradition. The earliest documented celebration in America dates back to 1933 at Keystone Camp in Brevard, North Carolina, where the all-girls summer camp threw a mock Christmas celebration complete with carols, a tree, and even a visit from Santa. The Blue Ridge Mountains of the Carolinas — solidly East Coast territory — were the original stage for this midsummer merriment.
In 1940, the concept made its way into pop culture with the film Christmas in July, a romantic comedy directed by Preston Sturges, whose catchy title helped cement the phrase in the public imagination. During the 1940s and ’50s, American servicemen stationed overseas during World War II also celebrated a summer version of Christmas, with these celebrations offering a comforting reminder of home and holiday spirit during difficult times.
Christmas in July is a monthlong, mid-summer celebration inspired by cozy Christmas traditions and themes. It isn’t a religious holiday, but it does uphold the spirit of family togetherness with decorated trees, festive feasts, and gatherings. Monthlong events and celebrations peak on July 24th and 25th.
Why the East Coast Takes It Seriously
There is a reason visitors travel to the East Coast for the holidays rather than away from it. This stretch of American coastline — from the cobblestone streets of Boston and the candlelit brownstones of Manhattan, down through the colonial charm of Annapolis, the garden squares of Savannah, and the salt-aired shores of the Outer Banks — carries within it a cultural memory of celebration that no other region of the country can replicate. These are communities that have been gathering around significant tables since before the nation itself existed. The ritual of the holiday meal here is not a seasonal habit. It is an inheritance — passed down through generations of families who understood that the way you set a table, the care you put into a dish, and the people you choose to surround yourself with are among the most deliberate decisions a person makes all year.
That depth of tradition is precisely what makes Christmas in July on the East Coast something entirely its own. While the rest of the country may treat the mid-summer holiday as a novelty — a themed cocktail, a playlist, a reason to put up string lights on a patio — the East Coast absorbs it into something with genuine weight. Summer here already moves at a different pace: slower evenings, longer tables pulled out onto porches, the kind of unhurried conversation that the heat seems to demand. Layered over that is the instinct, deeply regional and deeply felt, to mark the moment with food that means something. The result is a celebration that borrows the warmth of Christmas in Julywithout sacrificing the elegance the season deserves — and that combination, frankly, exists nowhere else quite like it does here.
The East Coast has always had a particular relationship with ritual and ceremony. From the historic estates of Newport to the garden parties of Savannah, from the supper clubs of Manhattan to the seafood shacks of coastal Maine, this corridor of America understands that the act of gathering around a beautiful table is never trivial — regardless of what the thermometer reads outside.
North Carolina alone needs little reason to celebrate the season mid-year, and communities across the region host annual Christmas in July festivals featuring traditional music, delicious food, and local traditions. Further north, cities like Auburn, New Hampshire, celebrate with festive community events where participants enjoy holiday-themed gatherings that bring neighbors together mid-summer.
There is also a deeply practical magic to celebrating twice. By July, the frenetic pace of the December holiday season — the obligations, the crowded restaurants, the rushed meals — feels blissfully distant. Christmas in July is an unofficial holiday that allows people to celebrate Christmas festivities during the summer months, including all the traditional activities such as decorating, cooking festive meals, and gathering, mirroring the December holiday spirit in the warmth of Christmas in July. In other words, it offers the spirit without the stress.er67
The Table as the Heart of the Celebration
Christmas in July has transcended geographical boundaries, becoming a playful way for people everywhere to extend the joy of Christmas beyond its traditional December timeframe. And nowhere does that extension feel more elegant — more intentional — than when it is organized around truly exceptional food. Finn + Emma
This is where private dining enters the picture in the most compelling way.
A private dining experience is, at its core, an act of curation. The host chooses who sits at the table, the chef chooses what is placed before them, and the evening itself becomes something that could not have existed anywhere else. It is the antithesis of the December holiday rush. There are no prix fixe menus engineered to turn tables quickly, no harried servers navigating overcrowded dining rooms. A private dinner in July — particularly one shaped by French culinary technique — is a deliberate choice to do the holidays properly.
Consider what a classically trained French chef brings to a Christmas in July table: the slow-braised preparations that benefit from summer’s best produce, the elevation of stone fruit into something worthy of a réveillon feast, the ability to honor the comforting richness of holiday cooking while keeping it seasonally alive. Dishes rooted in the French tradition — a perfectly executed duck confit, a layered terrine, a cold cucumber and tarragon velouté as a nod to the heat outside — become both festive and of-the-moment.
Private dining in this context is not an indulgence. It is the most honest way to celebrate. When a small group gathers around a beautifully set private table in July, they are doing exactly what the original campers at Keystone did in 1933: choosing to create joy outside the prescribed calendar, on their own terms, without waiting for permission.
Why Now Is the Right Time to Book
The summer calendar fills quickly on the East Coast. Weekends evaporate into travel, and by August, the best intentions of doing something truly memorable for friends or family have slipped away. Christmas in July — observed around July 25th — falls at precisely the moment when people are most receptive to an experience that stands apart from ordinary summer plans.
A private dining experience built around Christmas in July does something no gift card or discount can replicate: it gives people an evening they will actually talk about. The French have always understood this. The meal is not the prelude to the celebration — it is the celebration itself.
Reserved for the Few:
Chef Francis Transforms Christmas in July into a Private Dining Experience Like No Other
There is a particular quality of evening that only a certain kind of dinner can produce — the kind where time slows without anyone noticing, where the conversation deepens with each course, and where guests leave feeling not just well-fed but genuinely restored. That is the evening Chef Francis builds. And for Christmas in July, when the East Coast hums with summer and the calendar is blessedly empty of obligation, it becomes something else entirely.
This is what a Christmas in July private dinner with Francis could look like.
Arrival: 6:30 PM
Guests arrive to a space that honors both seasons at once. The Christmas in July table is set with deep evergreen linens, ivory tapers, and small arrangements of white garden roses and cedar sprigs — nothing overwrought, nothing that fights the warmth outside. A ceiling fan turns slowly overhead. There is Champagne waiting on ice, already poured.
The evening opens in the French tradition with an apéritif — a glass of Kir Royale or a Champagne cocktail — designed to set the tone for what is to come, pairing beautifully with small bites that arrive almost immediately. Francis’s version in July leans into the season: house-made gougères, still warm from the oven and exhaling wisps of Gruyère steam; smoked salmon on buckwheat blinis with a crown of crème fraîche and fresh dill; and bacon-wrapped Medjool dates, a nod to the festive richness of winter done in July’s more generous heat.
Guests settle. The Champagne does its work. The evening announces its intention without words.
First Course:
L'Amuse-Bouche et L'Entrée
A chilled cucumber and fresh tarragon velouté arrives in small porcelain cups — cool, pale green, and electric with summer herb — served alongside a single Marcona almond floating at the center. It is the dish that says: the kitchen is serious, and this is going to be worth your full attention.The entrée that follows is a foie gras torchon, set on brioche toasted in clarified butter, accompanied by a compressed white peach with Sauternes gelée and a pinch of fleur de sel. France is one of the main world producers of foie gras, and this luxurious delicacy finds its way onto any proper Christmas in July list. Here, the peach does what chestnut jam does in December — it cuts the richness, bridges the seasons, and makes you understand immediately why this dish exists.
Wine:
A 2021 Château Suduiraut Sauternes, poured with a light hand.
Second Course:
Les Coquilles Saint Jacques
Scallops are a beloved seafood starter for the réveillon feast. Although there are hundreds of options when it comes to preparing coquilles Saint Jacques, the most classic recipe is made with winter vegetables and cream sauce. Francis reinterprets this in July with pan-seared sea scallops from the East Coast — plump, caramelized hard on one side — resting on a bed of sweet corn pudding, finished with a light beurre blanc and scattered with crispy capers and micro herbs. The beurre blanc is a kitchen signature. It takes technique and patience and is exactly the kind of thing that separates a trained French chef from everyone else.
Wine:
A 2022 Domaine Leflaive Mâcon-Verzé, Burgundy.
The Main:
Le Plat Principal
In France, Christmas often features roasted capon or duck as the centerpiece, with each course meant to be savored slowly, surrounded by laughter and candlelight. Francis chooses duck for July — specifically, a slow-roasted magret de canard, the breast of a duck raised for foie gras, served sliced thin and fanned across the plate with a Bing cherry and red wine reduction. The fruit is July. The technique is timeless. Alongside it: a gratin dauphinois — thin-sliced Yukon Gold potatoes baked slowly in cream, garlic, and nutmeg until they collapse into themselves — and haricots verts finished in brown butter with toasted hazelnuts. It is the kind of plate that prompts silence first, then conversation. Both are the right response.
Wine:
◇ A 2019 Château Pichon Baron, Pauillac.
Fromages
Plateau de Trois Fromages
French cheese platters, even during Christmas in July, typically present cheeses in their pure form, enjoyed with sliced baguette, country bread, or pain d'épices — a course that adds a traditional touch to the festive meal. Francis presents three: a ripe Époisses, a Comté aged eighteen months, and a fresh chèvre rolled in summer herbs from the kitchen garden. A small pot of honey arrives with the board. A frisée salad with sherry vinaigrette clears the palate.
Dessert
La Bûche de Noël d'Été
Dessert at a traditional French Christmas feast is the bûche de noël — a classic French Christmas cake with cream layers shaped like a log, hearkening back to medieval France where a large log was kept burning over the twelve days of Christmas. Francis makes his in July and calls it exactly what it is, with one distinction: a summer bûche rolled with dark chocolate génoise, filled with a passion fruit and Tahitian vanilla crème, glazed in a bittersweet ganache, and decorated with candied lemon peel and gold leaf instead of the traditional forest-floor garnishes of December. It arrives at the table whole, is sliced in front of the guests, and is accompanied by a scoop of house-churned crème fraîche ice cream.
Digestif:
Armagnac, neat, in wide-mouthed glasses.
The Experience, in Sum
In France, Christmas is truly about the food — less about decorations and gifts. The meal is the celebration itself. A private dinner with Chef Francis celebrating Christmas in July is built on exactly that philosophy. There is no rush for a next seating. There is no ambient noise from a dining room beyond the door. There is only the table, the people around it, and a French chef who has structured the entire evening around the belief that great food, given time and proper attention, is the most generous thing one person can offer another.
The evening runs approximately three and a half hours. Guests leave when they are ready.
That is the only way a dinner like this should end.
Inquiries for private dining with Chef Francis are accepted on the site through Debra. Seasonal menus are curated per event. Space is intentionally limited.
Wish we lived in your area because this appears to be a fun celebration.