Executive dinners —
the table where the deal closes.

The best business conversations don't happen in conference rooms. They happen at dinner — after the third course, when everyone's guard drops enough for the real conversation to start. Most event planners can book a restaurant. Very few can design an evening.

We design the evening.

The dinners we produce most often.

Board dinners

Pre-meeting alignment, post-meeting decompression, or the annual board dinner where priorities shift. Small (8–14), formal enough to signal importance, casual enough to enable honesty. Typically in private dining rooms at venues where the room itself does half the work.

Major client / key account dinners

The evening before the contract renewal. The dinner after the deal closes. The mid-cycle “let’s get closer” dinner. These are investment pieces — you’re spending $200–$600 per head to keep or grow an account worth orders of magnitude more.

What we design for: seating charts that put the right people next to each other. Menus that accommodate the dietary outliers without flagging them. Conversation pacing — when dessert arrives, what's between each course, how long the toasts run.

Prospect dinners

10–30 high-value prospects, one night, one room. Used sparingly because they only work with the right guest list and the right host. Common for enterprise SaaS, financial services, and B2B pharma launches.

Executive reunion / alumni dinners

Former team members, key advisors, the people you want in your orbit for the next decade. More forgiving than the other formats but harder to get right — guest lists take weeks, not days.

What we handle.

• Venue selection and booking. Private dining rooms at the right restaurants, historic courtyards, private mansions, chef's tables at top kitchens. We know the ones that matter.
• Guest list coordination. Dietary intel, preference tracking, seating chart design, assistant coordination for the VIPs who never answer their own email.
• Menu curation. Working with the chef to design the night — not picking from a prix fixe. Wine pairings. Dietary modifications that don't flag individual guests.
• Environmental design. Florals, lighting, music, menu cards, branded touches where they belong and absent where they don’t. The goal is the room feels inevitable.
• Transportation. Black-car service, hotel pickups, late-night returns. Everything your VIP guests expect to already be handled.
• On-site management. Someone from Clandestine is present the entire evening, handling the moments guests never notice because they went right.

Budget reality.

Most executive dinners we produce land between $15K and $75K depending on guest count, venue, and program depth. At the low end: 8 people, private dining room, curated menu, no programming. At the high end: 30 people, custom venue buyout, live music, bespoke menu, gift program, custom branded elements.

We don’t markup vendors. You see the venue invoice, the florist invoice, the transportation invoice. We charge a producer fee on top. You know exactly where your budget goes.

Case study references.

• Hyosung Innovue VIP Rebranding Launch — New Orleans
• Physician Dinner Programs (the compliance-regulated version of this service)