by Cathy Erway
During the long subway ride back to Brooklyn after the dinner that night, I began thinking about how I would invent my own supper club. Mine would be different from each of these, somehow.
It was May. On one of the first warm Friday nights of the spring, warm enough to warrant the first barbecue of the season, I found myself on Matt’s rooftop patio in Williamsburg. We had just finished taping a first-ever video for my blog. Matt had by then begun a new job working as a freelance videographer and was eager to create more videos to add to his reel. On a lark, I had decided to submit an amateur video for a new television show on the Food Network. A friend of mine, Darin, was a producer for the new show Ask Aida and encouraged me to make a video in which I ask the show’s host about a cooking-related dilemma. The basis of the show was that the host, Aida Mollenkamp, would then solve the problem through her culinary expertise.
My particular dilemma, however, was a little outside the realm of basic kitchen skills.
After several cuts due to mess-ups and giggling, I stood in Matt’s kitchen and told the camera, “Recently single, and on the rebound, I’ve been thinking about what to cook on a date.”
I went on to ask Aida what types of foods or dishes might be considered aphrodisiacs, so as to seduce a potential (and potentially disinclined) lover. Matt and I wrapped up the shooting around early evening, just as the sun was beginning to set. We ate dinner on his roof, some simple pasta with asparagus that I’d brought along to stage in the video. A little later on, we were joined by Karol and Jordan, and that night we managed to attend a series of rooftop and backyard cookouts. There were three parties going on in Matt’s building and the building next door to his (which was easy to get to by climbing over a rail between the roofs), and we hopped to and from them for the rest of the night.
At some point during these festivities, the idea for SOS was born. We were all four of us single, and all eager to meet new people as well as cook and eat together more. I wanted to create a supper club, but with some sort of twist. The name “Singles-Only Supper Club” popped into my head. The idea was, we would invite only guests who were single, in the hopes of seducing them with aphrodisiac food. Each one of us would invite one guest of the opposite sex whom we were interested in dating. The person should not be someone we knew very well—least of all, someone we had a history with. This would be something of an exercise in working up the guts to ask someone to come to a small dinner party. Also, the other guests wouldn’t know what we were up to—except that we were having a small dinner party. No mention of the real meaning behind the acronym SOS would be uttered around them.
We even tossed around the idea of reviving the “key party,” a phenomenon of 1970s upper-class circles that involved a bowl where the men would place their keys. At the end of the night, each woman at the party would reach into the bowl, scoop up a set of keys, and go home with the owner of them. The ritual was often played out with married couples seeking a little sexual adventure, so it was risky business when it came to personal feelings. But while we were willing to take the risk of causing jealousy and ill will among ourselves, we weren’t willing to take the risk of going home with one another. As much as I loved Matt, I wasn’t about to sleep with him. At least, not under my normal, non-aphrodisiac-influenced circumstances.
Through e-mails over the next week or so, we tightened down the idea further. I sent an overly formal e-mail to my coconspirators, Karol, Matt, and Jordan, laying out the game plan and offering my apartment for the first dinner. I came up with a code name for myself in all SOS-related correspondence and encouraged the others to do so, too—just another ridiculous element of our scheme.
I also came up with a menu for the first dinner. It began with a salad featuring fresh, lightly blanched asparagus. It was in season, first of all, but most important, my research had identified it as a supposed aphrodisiac food to many cultures. Second, I’d make a lobster risotto—just because it was luxurious and something I’d always wanted to try—with another aphrodisiac food, fennel. For the main course, I decided on beef cheeks, braised in a red wine sauce for hours, and served with a pomegranate juice reduction on a bed of mashed butternut squash. (For some reason, the words beef cheeks struck me as racy.) Pomegranate and butternut were both known to raise heart levels and enhance “performance.” There would be a dish involving eggplant, another supposed aphrodisiac. For dessert, a buttery-sweet amaretto ice cream would be in store. In many cultures, it’s thought—and this is likely due to the word’s similarity to amore, or love—that the almond liqueur or almonds in general were romantically inspiring.
Underground supper clubs may sound like novel, urban inventions, but they have more in common with period feasts than with anything restaurant-like. The tradition of feasting, elaborately and over long, leisurely hours, has moved for the most part from fine homes to restaurants. Even wedding banquets are rarely held in homes today. Modern supper clubs aim to bring the grandiose dinner back into a private setting.
In The Invention of the Restaurant, Rebecca Spang described what would become the most notorious private banquet in eighteenth-century Paris, held by an affluent eccentric named Balthazar Grimod de la Reynière. The dinner was exclusive to a select number of distinguished guests, who were unsuspecting of the evening’s full extent; at his dimly lit chateau, they made their way to the dining room through a long, sinewy hallway and a series of chambers. A black-draped coffin placed atop the dining table set the night’s macabre tone. At the entrance, “heralds dressed in Roman robes examined the guests’ invitations,” and after further scrutiny, a pass code, and admittance, in the final stage of initiation, hired hands dressed as choirboys perfumed the guests with incense.
Of course, details of the dinner that Grimod held were known only by attendees and passed on by word of mouth. However, the gossip must have spread among the Paris elite, and Grimod basked in the mystery that he had created.
Similar to this, today’s supper clubs thrive on the limited publicity creating a sense of mystery and legend surrounding their activities. Word of mouth is very much the prevailing—and preferred—modus operandi. The Whisk and Ladle owns a website under its name, but it’s sparse, and hardly an exact detail is mentioned—no names, locations, or exact dates. Visitors can simply register to receive e-mails from the club, whenever they are sent out. That places like Whisk and Ladle have a high stake in their secrecy comes with good reason, too: They’re completely illegal. No food and health department ever checks their kitchen premises or their operation standards. But most important, no business plan was formalized to accept the customers’ payments. Therefore, supper clubs usually describe their fixed dinner prices as “contributions”—a gratuitous offering, a willing exchange, rather than a strict payment. These are details that, like the dinner’s location, are told to diners only in follow-up e-mails once their RSVP has been accepted.
You could consider all this and reach the conclusion that the people who start supper clubs want to make money, doing so by making food, but are too lazy to get a proper license and commercial space, and prefer to do things under the table in a manner that’s more comfortable, not to mention financially beneficial to them. But money is beside the point for most of the people I’ve met who run supper clubs—and I’ve met at least a dozen of them by now. Many of them have no intention of ever opening or working in a real restaurant, instead aiming to create an intimate, alternate dining environment and do what they love to do—cook, free of the burdens of public scrutiny and financial incentives. And they have their niches, as well: one supper club in New York is based around the premise of locally harvested, seasonal foods; another hosts dinners with a theme attached to each one, like the Roaring Twenties. A Razor, A Shiny Knife is a supper club based around the premise of instructional cooking demos, and guests are invited to get a hands-on education in the dishes that are served for the night. There are also supper clubs with little or no theme other than that no one at the table need any preexisting social co
nnections; they’re held in a setting resembling a home dinner party. In the fall of 2008, a two-night, hundred-guest dinner event was orchestrated among five supper clubs called Undergrounds Unite. The event was elaborate, large, and some say overpriced, at $100 a plate. But it was a unique milestone in the short history of the supper club trend. Unlike most big foodie events, however, it was kept very much out of the public eye, known to only those who attended it. None of it was spilled to the press.
You can see how some of today’s supper club conspirators have that same glimmer of mischief that Grimod must have had. I can imagine that today’s supper club hosts and hostesses must share some secretive delight in withholding details about a dinner until shortly before it is held, or in being choosy about who gets a seat. The word club connotes exclusivity, and within this private realm, it is true that pretty much anything can happen. At a restaurant, “The customer is always right” motto defines how restaurateurs run their businesses: to please the customer, bending over backward sometimes by changing menu items and other details given what’s been most successful. At supper clubs, it could be more common that the creators shape their guests to fit their vision. At one dinner given by A Razor, A Shiny Knife, guests were instructed to come dressed all in white. The clean, sparse loft where the dinner was held was drenched in white, marked by a single long, twenty-two-person table draped in white cloth. Only the kitchen staff (including myself) was dressed in all black. With another supper club called the Underground Food Collective, based in Madison, Wisconsin, guests are often treated to surprise visits from the farmer, or winemaker, who produced some of the evening’s delights. In the case of SOS, our guests—whoever they were—would be the unsuspecting guinea pigs for a highly aphrodisiac-charged, and hopefully delicious, meal.
One day while I was chucking spam e-mails from my in-box, I came to an e-mail with the subject line, “This is not spam, this is Morgan.”
Who the hell was that? I paused for a moment at the DELETE button, then decided to open it.
“Hi, Cathy,” it read. “We met while I was tending bar.”
Oh, right, I remembered. A week or so earlier, I had met up with my friend Scott, a fellow food writer. He’d insisted on going to a certain upscale Manhattan restaurant for a drink because a friend of his worked at the bar and could make “a mean drink.” His friend Morgan.
In the e-mail, Morgan complimented my blog and offered a recipe for a simple black beans and rice dish. I thanked him in a quick reply and told him I’d have to try the recipe sometime. I was used to receiving mail like this from blog readers or new acquaintances and did my best to respond to them all. His response the next day was followed, in a postscript, with a proposal: “Ever thought about Not Drinking Out in New York? If you’re interested, I could do a cocktail demonstration sometime, and invite a few friends over. You could invite friends, too. It could be fun. Let me know.”
I had to agree, it did sound like fun. I hesitated, then shrugged it off—after all, this was a friend of a friend. I wrote back enthusiastically. We chose a night the upcoming week, and I roped Karol into coming along with me for the cocktail tutorial at Morgan’s place.
Up until then, home cocktail making conjured chilling visions of Sean and Meredith’s floor of full liquor bottles. In the last few months of living together, Ben had become a bit of a fancy-booze collector, too. I’d kept my own apartment clean of bottles, to ward against such obsession. As a result, I didn’t know much about making drinks.
The cocktail night turned out to be low-key, informative, and a lot of fun. We made basic, beginner-level cocktails like the old-fashioned, gin and tonic, and whiskey sour. Afterward, Karol and I found ourselves with a newfound appreciation for gin and ringing headaches, and I found my SOS date. That night, after making a few rounds of homemade cocktails, Morgan’s four friends had taken off, and he, Karol, and I had gone to a nearby bar. Karol and I couldn’t help but bring up the subject of our upcoming dinner, though we were tactful to not mention the full extent of SOS. Morgan jumped in to ask about wine pairing for the menu. We both shrugged, not having given it much thought until then. He then offered to act as sommelier, should we need one, and pair each dish with an appropriate wine. It sounded like a great idea.
There was definite chemistry between Morgan and me that night. Over the next few days, we kept up by e-mail and tried to make plans for the next week. It seemed natural to pin Morgan as my SOS “date,” and I urged the rest of the team to hurry up and find theirs soon.
Karol was lagging, having asked one or two people who weren’t able to make the date we’d eventually settled on. Matt was also shot down by his top choice. Jordan was thinking about asking a coworker of hers but couldn’t seem to find the right way to do so. In the meantime, we talked about how to set the price for the meal. Through all my months of blogging, I had a good sense of what a small meal for two to four would cost. (Each recipe on my blog included a “Cost Calculator” feature in which I tallied up all the prices of the ingredients used.) But I had no idea how much this elaborate dinner for eight was going to be—and the wines added to the confusion. I hated above all the idea of overcharging guests at a supper club. The cash contribution at Ted and Amy’s supper club and SocialEats was relatively fair, at $35 per head, but the $50 tag at Whisk and Ladle was a little steep. The whole concept of charging guests stank to me of “real” restaurants. However, it was also pretty unavoidable, if the club were to keep throwing dinners regularly. We went with $35 for each SOS guest, which in my estimation would cover the expensive ingredients I was planning to pepper my dishes with—a dollop of American caviar and crème fraîche on the lobster risotto, the lobster itself, the beef cheeks, the pomegranate. Along with some greens, the asparagus salad would have either chunks of avocado or else sauteed portobellos, both pricey items. But I wouldn’t have wanted to do the dinner any other way than ultraluxurious, hoping to set a romantic mood.
Finally, Karol pinned down her “date,” a friend/acquaintance named George, who worked at a bar that she frequented. As for Matt, he was determined to meet the girl of his dreams the weekend before the dinner. That weekend, the Whisk and Ladle Supper Club happened to be hosting a party in their loft. Not a dinner, it was their end-of-season shebang, called the Pink Ball. The exclusive invitation described a dress code of pink and white and promised live bands and DJs, aerial silk-rope dancers, and games like Twister and “musical clothing.” I was allowed to come with only one guest, and since Matt saw it as an opportunity to meet his girl, I brought him along. I’d found a seventies pink-and-white printed dress and wrapped an old brown leather belt around the middle to cinch the waist. Matt bought an old ladies’ pink pullover with snowflake embroidery, put on his roommate’s white track pants, and tossed a pink scarf that I gave him around his neck. I thought we looked pretty amazing.
The party was crowded the minute we arrived. In the kitchen, we snacked on pink cupcakes with pink icing, and trays of homemade raspberry-pomegranate and fresh strawberry ice cream that were melting to a pleasing, sweet sludge. We moved on to the bar area, where Nick and a friend were serving four different pink cocktails with the likes of strawberry-infused vodka and guava nectar. We tried them all.
Before long, the party seemed to have bloated into an all-consuming mass of pastel-clothed bodies. One guy was even running around in nothing more than a pink loincloth. To add to my disorientation, everywhere I turned, I could have sworn that I recognized faces, but not well enough to know how, or from where.
“Are you that ‘don’t eat out’ girl?” a tall, familiar-looking guy asked me.
“How did you know?” I asked. We’d met at Whisk and Ladle once before, he said, “when you were on the swing.”
This explained why I couldn’t place him at first. He was standing beside two friends of his, another Asian guy and a pretty brunette girl, both of whom I didn’t recognize. Matt and I introduced ourselves to them. The girl, Lauren, started asking me about my blog, and I explained t
he concept while she nodded enthusiastically. She was wearing white jeans and a silky printed tank that hit below the hips. We ended up hanging out with Lauren and her two friends for most of the night, dancing and watching the bands and silk-rope dancers perform, twirling like acrobats from silk sheaths hung from the loft’s ceiling. I could tell that Matt was really into Lauren, so once it got late, I decided to take off alone. The party was in no way winding down, but I also realized I’d had more pink drinks than I could rightly count. I could barely walk to the door and find my jacket.
I stumbled to a convenience store down the street to use the ATM for cash to take a cab home. I stood for a moment on the busy main drag of Williamsburg, which was flooded with people getting out of bars, looking to grab grub or a ride home. I waited as a couple of cabs went by, already filled with passengers. Then a familiar face approached me—it was Brian, who had just been at the Whisk and Ladle party, too.
“Hey, Cathy,” he said. “Waitin’ for a cab?”
We chatted for a minute on the street, glancing up and down the streets for yellow taxis. “I’m going in to grab a slice. Want one?” Brian asked, motioning to the pizza place next door.
“Uhh ...”
“Come on, I’ll get you one,” he said.
“This is kind of against my religion . . . ,” I heard myself saying. But I followed him inside, and as Brian signaled with two fingers to the counterperson, and was handed two white plates with steaming-hot, shining slabs of pizza, I felt my resolve immediately weaken.
The pizza was too soggy to fold in half. I couldn’t actually lift it from the plate without it bending like a thin sheet of paper, so that all the cheese and sauce rushed toward the triangular tip. I ended up shoveling it into my mouth from the plate. We stood outside eating, watching the street. Though Brian was making some sort of conversation, I couldn’t actually answer him since my mouth was working the molten cheese into fine, chewable pieces. Seeing that my mouth was unavoidably smeared with grease, Brian handed me a napkin, grinning politely at my hearty appetite.