When my dad turned 60, in 2000, I compiled a cookbook, asking for recipes from foodies and chefs he knew or admired, writers and restaurants he favored and frequented. Mr. Trotter sent one for grilled lamb loin and balsamic red onion salad with artichoke vinaigrette, with the handwritten message, “You’re not getting older, you’re getting better!”

I moved to Chicago the next year, and shortly afterward was roundly outbid for Chef for a Day at a charity event. And so it went at umpteen auctions for the next five years, with bidding always starting above my pay grade and sometimes hitting five figures. Then I went to my nephew’s public-school auction, where my sister and I managed to steal the prize for $600-something.

“I could see when I got there that the average person that buys this thing, they’re worried that they don’t know anything about the kitchen,” Dad recalled. “They kept asking me if I wanted to sit down, if I wanted to relax.”

After the pearl onions and the parsley, he stood at the appetizer station, helping assemble a dish he remembers as having “seven or nine steps,” with “a piece of tuna poached in a bag, chopped parsley, soft-cooked egg.” They gave him a white coat, poured him Champagne, took lots of pictures. And then seven members of our family joined him for a dinner that cost about as much as a small car.

Mr. Trotter said he came up with the Chef for a Day concept early on, out of concern for the bottom line: Charities were constantly asking him to donate dinners for six or eight, when he was doing maybe 100 covers a night. “Do you call General Motors and say, ‘Can you donate 6 to 8 percent of your business?’ ” he asked.

As with so many of Mr. Trotter’s innovations, other restaurants soon adopted the practice, and wealthy would-be chefs were picking up paring knives all over the place. Next, Mr. Trotter started auctioning Dinner in Your Home: he and his team would fly around the country to cook for the highest bidder. He has done maybe 150 of these in the last four years, plus 30 more in his town house a couple of blocks from the restaurant. They go for five- or six-figure sums; once, he said, after a bidding war to $180,000, he agreed to do two dinners, netting $360,000 for his friend Emeril Lagasse’s children’s foundation.

“We’re in the mind-blowing business,” he said. “Always have been.”

Most nights when the restaurant is open, Mr. Trotter also hosts 15 to 20 students from local high schools, who are served the Grand Menu (current retail price: $195) in a private dining room as they watch the action next door on large screens.