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The Home Restaurant

There are different types of underground restaurant. The ‘home restaurant’ is, for me, the most interesting, intimate and authentic of the supper-club genre.

The notion of the home as a private space is quite recent, only since Victorian times. The home restaurant is blurring the lines between public, work and family space. You are welcoming complete strangers into your home. Your taste in décor, your books, your music taste, your crockery, your bathroom toiletries, even your underwear (if, like me, you sometimes forget to tidy it from the drying line) is open to inspection.

The home restaurant appeals to the foodie and the voyeur. It is as if the TV programme Come Dine With Me (in which strangers eat at someone’s house and award them points) has mated with Masterchef (the TV cookery competition for amateur chefs hoping to become professional) and Through the Keyhole (in which the camera films inside a private home and a panel has to guess the celebrity to whom it belongs).

At a home restaurant, the food is usually cooked by a talented amateur or a wannabe professional. It can be a rehearsal for opening a commercial restaurant. In the case of Nuno Mendez, chef of former restaurant Bacchus, his home restaurant (supper club The Loft) was a way of testing out menus in preparation for opening his subsequent restaurant Viajante. His restaurant now open, Nuno retained The Loft as a showcase for talented young chefs.

For David Clasen, who has been running the supper club First Weekend since 2003, his home restaurant is ‘a slow burn. I’m building up skills, menus and a clientele for the part-time restaurant I hope to open in a few years’.

Even pop stars’ wives are getting in on the act: Ronnie Wood’s ex-wife Jo Wood has opened up her mansion and gardens to the public for ‘Mrs Paisley’s Lashings’. Does Jo, who has cooked nutritional food for The Rolling Stones on tour, stand sweating behind the stove? No, she has hired in a pro, Arthur Potts Dawson, from Kings Cross restaurant Acorn House. The price is equally starry…£160 per person. Doubtless, guests are hoping to be sat next to diners like Mick Jagger, who happens to be Arthur Potts Dawson’s uncle.