About Fine Dining Solutions & Our Chef

Welcome to the website of Fine Dining Solutions (R), the epicurean solution to DC Metro chef services(SM).

We provide fine-dining, restaurant quality dishes through a variety of chef service options: personal chef, private cooking classes, private chef and small catering chef services to the DC Metro area. 

Just remember – there are NO FOOD STOCK PHOTOS on this site – all dishes pictured throughout these pages are dishes we have actually prepared for clients like yourself.

The goal of Fine Dining Solutions is to create a fine-dining experience for you and your family that is easy and convenient to serve in the comfort of your home. With a meal in far less time than it takes to order take-out or pick up food on the way home, you will be able to enjoy a gourmet-quality dining experience, completely customized to your palate. It will take the worry out of cooking in the evenings, saving you time and peace of mind, knowing the food is completely from scratch, with the finest and freshest ingredients available.

Our chef/owner is Shanna Follansbee. Originally from Selah, a very small town in Washington State, Chef Shanna grew up in the wine and farming country of the Yakima Valley. She spent much of her time on the family farm, where her mother and grandmothers gave her her first cooking lessons through apple & cherry pies with fresh fruit from their family orchards.

After college at the University of Washington, she made her home in the DC Metro area. Maryland, Virginia and DC make a great place to live with lush green hills, beautiful seaports and beaches, and the cosmopolitan feel of a "big city". She pursued a culinary education at L'Academie de Cuisine (Gaithesburg, MD), the premiere culinary school of the Mid-Atlantic region and graduated with honors. The traditional French techniques accompanied with her small town work ethic, opened the kitchen doors for her to work in Washington, DC's most elegant and exclusive restaurants.

Chef Shanna Follansbee has cooked at Butterfield 9 (Voted one of the 100 Best Restaurants in the World by Conde Nast Traveler and noted in the Washington Post), New Heights Restaurant (a known training ground for many of DC's up chefs: Greggory Hill-David Greggory, John Wabeck-Firefly), Maestro at the Ritz-Carlton, Tyson’s Corner (with numerous awards, such as a Four Star Mobile Rating and 4 Stars from the Washingtonian) and Restaurant Eve ( Food & Wine's Best New Chef's of 2006 Award and a three and a half star rating from the Washingtonian) and even volunteered as an assistant at over 30 professional culinary classes through L'Academie de Cuisine’s recreational school always gaining new knowledge and advisement in new and interesting cooking trends.

Chef Shanna Follansbee also teaches numerous public demonstration and particpation cooking classes at various Williams-Somoma, Inc. around the DC metro area. For a list of her upcoming classes, click here.

Hundreds of DC's most discerning palates have enjoyed the meals she's prepared for them on a nightly basis in restaurants - and we are happy to provide those standards of dish quality and meal service to all our clients.

Chef Shanna Follansbee is a member in good standing of the Women Chef & Restaurateurs' (WCR), as well as a local exchange volunteer coordinator for their DC Area Chapter and she also enjoys planning weekend retreats for WCR members and non-members through the WCR travel committee planning local and national food/wine related events committed to the advancement/education of 'fine dining' techiques through quality products/cooking techinque advancements in local, national and international markets. She is also a member of the American Personal Chef Association (APCA) and their Mid-Atlantic Chapter.

Fine Dining Solutions is licensed by the City of Alexandria, insured and our chef is ServSafe Certified with a food safety management certificate administered by the National Restaurant Association.

Please feel free to call us (703.869.1242) or email us today to talk about your epicurean needs.