Eyes in Culinary Arts - Supper Clubs in London

Source: London Times - by Daisy Greenwell March

Will the success of underground restaurants kill the anti-commercial concept of the supper club?

Two years ago, on a scruffy East London council estate, I ate my first secret supper. The nine-course Japanese feast, and the oddity of being cooked for by a stranger in his home, made it one of the most memorable dinners of my life. This was cooking purely for passion's sake, a far cry from the traditional restaurant experience, and that was the point.
"People want to go to someone's house, talk to the chef, dance on the table with strangers and have a time entirely unlike going to a 'proper' restaurant," says punk musician Horton Jupiter, founder of the first secret supper club, The Secret Ingredient.

Ten miles across London, that same windswept January, 41-year-old Ms Marmitelover also launched a secret restaurant. For this anarchist co-operative café cook and food blogger (aka Kerstin Rodgers), her Underground Restaurant was a reaction to the corporatisation of food: "The idea was to create an underground food movement in which we wrest control of food from big business and high street chain restaurants and encourage home cooking," she says.
A month after I dined on Jupiter's teetering towers of seaweedy cabbage rolls and lemon-spiced horseradish, the news of this small but extraordinary trend hit the national news. Top foodie critics such as A.A. Gill and Jay Rayner gave glowing reviews and what started with just two soon exploded — a new way of eating was catapulted into Britain's consciousness.

Now there are more than 80 supper clubs in London and hundreds more opening around the country, from Honey Wild in the Scottish Borders to Unthank Supper Club in Norwich and the Chinese fusion Yee Tak Hampton in deepest Dorset.

"It's insane," admits Rodgers. "When I did that first one I really didn't know if anyone would turn up. But I was inundated, and now it seems to have developed into a new career path for people to follow."
Thanks to the super-powered "word-of-mouth" afforded by social networking, and a recession-driven passion for thrift, supper clubs have been assimilated into British culture with extraordinary speed. The concept has mutated from just suppers into breakfast clubs, tea parties, singleton, foraged and even opera dinners.
Many of those amateur cooks — Rodgers, James Ramsden of The Secret Larder, the chic duo Rosie French and Eleanor Grace of Salad Club, and Brixton-based Arno Maasdorp, of Saltoun Supper Club, to name just a few — will be publishing cookery books in the coming year, and many are now devoting their energies full-time to their culinary cause. There are whispered plans for brand extensions including a "gourmet library-café", travelling salad vans, and even bricks-and-mortar restaurants.

Predictably, marketing men have been quick to recognise the supper club's edgy, guerrilla appeal. TV producers have latched on to the concept as fodder for a series of similar programmes, from Channel 4's The Secret Supper Club to the BBC's Restaurant in your Home and Virgin's Restaurant in our Living Room. Publishers are busy transforming the trend into book sales, and internet entrepreneurs have set up websites such as the Supperclub Fan Club and HouseBites, which collate the once-illicit dinners into postcode- searchable listings.
Many supper clubs are no longer a cheap alternative to eating out. While Jupiter and Rodgers began by asking £10 and £15 a dinner respectively, they now ask on average £35 (Rodgers and Maasdorp) and up to £120 (Nuno Mendes' Loft Project) for a meal. James Ramsden, who runs The Secret Larder from his flat in a converted Victorian school in North London, thinks that high prices defeat the aim of raising two fingers to snobbish restaurants and their "swanky jus smears".

"The whole point was that you don't have to go and spend £50 on some silly, ponced-up food," he says. "It was 'come to my home, pay £10 and I'll cook you some nice dinner'."
Ramsden argues that supper clubs, anarchist no longer, are at risk of being swallowed up by the corporatisation against which they first railed. "Business has definitely slowed down for everyone," says the 25-year-old, who is known for his man-food with flourishes: home-made sausages or monkfish with smoked black pudding. "At the beginning we'd sell out our two monthly dates in half an hour. Now there's certainly not the immediate rush. Kerstin had a patch towards the end of last year where she couldn't get any bookings and was really struggling. That aspect of it being so exclusive is gone."
Kerstin Rodgers has noticed the type of punters changing: "The first were early adopters, trendy people. We had stars like Kate Nash and Ryan Jarman of the Cribs," she says. "Now it's spreading to the general populace, but I still get an interesting mix of guests."

Although the concept of paying to eat in a stranger's home was alien to the UK until two years ago, globally it has a healthy tradition. You can enjoy home-cooked beef in Argentina or ropa vieja in Cuba, which is famous for its paladares (tiny, family-run restaurants). Over the past 30 years 100,000 diners have enjoyed the open-door Sunday suppers at Jim Haynes's Parisian apartment, and supper clubs have bubbled under in New York for years.
This perhaps explains why many supper-club hosts report an increasing number of foreign dinner guests.
"You can go to Big Ben or Buckingham Palace, but to get a real insight into the English, nothing was better than going to The Underground Restaurant," says Xing Liu, a Chinese visitor. "We sat and ate in Kerstin's home, shared our table with friendly (English) strangers and ate amazing home-cooked (English) food."
Rosie French, the 28-year-old co-founder of Salad Club, which serves everything from bold salads to meaty pies, says that the sheer number of supper clubs has brought the scene to a tipping point. The award-winning duo have taken it as their cue to move on and focus on writing their cookery book: "It was an amazing learning experience but we feel it's time to let that baby go. The scene has peaked," she says. "I think many supper clubs will stop."

Arno Maasdorp, 40, disagrees. For him, this is no passing fad: his Saltoun Supper Club is two years old and "going from strength to strength".
A food stylist and photographer by day and a twice-weekly supper-club host by night, Maasdorp welcomes the retreat of the "skinny-jean Shoreditch crowd who just want to be seen somewhere funky and new". He views his supper club as just that: a club for those serious about food. "It simply brings like-minded people together."
In a world where restaurant meals are becoming increasingly homogenised, Maasdorp believes that the supper club provides a niche for those seeking "a different experience".
The trend is certainly still thriving beyond the capital. The Spice Club, in Manchester, opened last year, hoping to dispense with the idea of "just a curry" and introduce people to the pleasure of a proper home-cooked dish. Six months in, they are at full tilt. "People seem to love it," says founder Monica Sawhney. "We're booked up weeks in advance."
Even so, the supper club is no route to riches. Like all the hosts to whom I spoke, Maasdorp barely breaks even. When your restaurant opens once a week, holds only 12 people and can't sell alcohol, it has to be about passion for food rather than financial gain.

The small income they do earn, however, makes supper clubs the "holy grail" of the new media world, according to Tim Hayward, editor of the new food magazine Fire & Knives. "It's easy to create fame and reputation online — everyone's doing it — but it's almost impossible to monetise it, and that's exactly what these supper-club hosts are doing."

But if the monetary rewards are negligible, supper-club hosts are bubbling with new, entrepreneurial ways to exploit their love of food.

For Maasdorp, Saltoun works as an "interactive business card". Every week he takes it on the road to gallery openings, launch parties and private dinners. He is also talking to a production company about a TV show, but he is not prepared to compromise: "We're working to find an idea focused on the joy and sharing of food, not the pie on the floor and scores out of ten."

Grace and French plan to take full advantage of an impending change in the law. From April, the owners of retail spaces empty for more than three months will be forced to pay higher rates. Landlords can avoid this only by renting their premises, even on a temporary six-week basis — giving small entrepreneurs the power to bargain for more affordable rents. "We hope to create temporary restaurants in unusual spaces," says French.
Rodgers, meanwhile, has launched an "underground farmers' market" where, she says, 500 people and 50 market stalls converge on her house and garden for a day-long celebration of food. They even have a "Dragon's Den", with industry experts judging and choosing new food products from small entrepreneurs. Thanks to Rodgers, the Japanese-born food blogger Hiromi Stone's soy sauce, seaweed and saké nuts will soon be on the shelves at Harvey Nichols. Rodgers's Underground University is even more dynamic: £100-a-pop weekend workshops on how to become a food blogger, and how to start your own supper club.

"Just because you are left-of-centre or anarchist, it doesn't mean that you don't need to make money," she says. "We still come up with great business ideas, but ones based on good ethics."

"What's really exciting about supper clubs is that no two are alike," says Hayward. "They make eating out a much less corporate, beige experience, and give young cooks opportunities to experiment with food and business. That can only be a good thing."