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Why Start a Supper Club?

Do you make money from a home restaurant? Not much. The home chef hasn’t got access to trade discounts and suppliers because they order in only small amounts. Even so, as the banking system collapsed and parliamentary democracy trembled in the wake of financial scandal, were supper clubs a response to the recession?

Many of the home-restaurant chefs certainly started up because of financial necessity. I’m a single mother, raising a child on a low income. This is a way of starting my own business from my home. Working away from home is always an issue for parents, particularly mothers, so a home restaurant is a perfect entrepreneurial match.

But it has its problems too: the rest of your family must become accustomed to sharing their private space with strangers. There are sacrifices. These I will elaborate on later in the book.

Tony Hornecker, on why he started his home restaurant, The Pale Blue Door, in his studio, says that ‘because of the recession, I wasn’t getting any work. I was literally living on onions. Now at least I can pay my rent.’

While it is probably no coincidence that the ubiquity of supper clubs in Buenos Aires increased in the wake of their financial crisis in 2003, more important, I believe, than the ‘recession story’ is the opportunity to socialise. Most home restaurants are based in big cities, where, despite the crowds, it’s hard to get to know other people. One of the things that surprised me at first was the social-networking aspect of my underground restaurant. As the weeks went on, I realised that larger mixed tables worked better than many small tables. Part of the attraction was meeting other people face to face, people that you may so far have ‘met’ only on the Internet. Even though you are with people you don’t know, there is an instant connection, you are all strangers in a strange land, and there are common subjects – the food, the house, and the cook – to talk about.

It’s also great for lone diners. Women in particular may feel uncomfortable going alone to a restaurant on a Saturday night. Large mixed tables remove the stigma, the embarrassment of dining alone publicly. You won’t feel like a saddo!

The first home-restaurant marriage surely is not far away. (Although once, a couple who had got together six weeks previously at Horton Jupiter’s restaurant split up while at my restaurant. As the hostess, I was left with the responsibility of making sure the abandoned, drunk and scantily dressed ex-girlfriend got home safely.)

I must admit, in the back of my mind, I thought I could meet someone through my supper club. The reality is that I’m too busy in the kitchen, perspiring the welcome cocktail, staggering around in heels and a smeared apron, and shouting at people, for this to have been a successful romantic venture.

In a sense, a home restaurant, which celebrates the oldest communal activity in the world – eating dinner together – has been made possible by the Internet, by new media. It’s turning the virtual into the real.

I had been blogging about food for a couple of years before starting The Underground Restaurant. I mentioned in a post that it was about to open and was delighted that some readers immediately requested an invitation.

From the beginning, The Underground Restaurant has been open to complete strangers, people I have never met. Other supper clubs trod more warily, with a long period entertaining friends and acquaintances before opening up to the public. I remember Horton announcing, slightly nervously, on Facebook, two months after opening, ‘This is the first evening that nobody I know will be coming!’

Some supper-club hosts vet their guests carefully. I had problems getting a reservation at one when I booked in my real name, sending at least ten e-mails without reply. When I booked under MsMarmiteLover, I immediately got a reply: ‘You should have said who you were,’ he announced, ‘You would have got in straight away!’ This supper-club host doesn’t want lone diners who ‘make everybody feel uncomfortable sitting there on their own,’ or anybody that he considers would not ‘fit in’. This host is as exclusive as I am inclusive. As I said, everybody has their own style.

Is all this a rejection of overpriced formal restaurants? I liken the home restaurant phenomenon to the punk revolution of 1976. At that time, young people had become frustrated with mega-rich pop stars escaping to America to become tax exiles, hanging out with Princess Margaret on the island of Mustique, and creating concept albums filled with meandering songs. (Pop is, after all, a grassroots movement in which talented people from humble beginnings can ascend the social ladder.) Young people wanted three-minute pop tunes and bands playing local venues for which they could afford tickets. Punk was born.

Most celebrated chefs today are media creatures, for the most part male, and rarely behind the stove of the restaurant that bears their name. Cooking professionally is hard work and long hours, for little pay. Bullying is rife in the industry, both physical and psychological. Even the names, the rankings – chef de rang, chef de partie – have their roots in the army. The glory of cooking in a professional restaurant lies only in repeat bookings and murmurs of ‘My compliments to the chef.’

Like dinosaur prog rockers from the 70s, ‘sleb’ chefs have sometimes turned their backs on the audience. Chefs can make more money from TV shows, cookbooks and endorsed cookware than from their restaurants. Like haute-couture fashion houses, the money is not in the clothes but in the merchandising, the perfume. Like women’s magazines, the gloss and the perfect lifestyle of today’s cookbooks can both inspire aspiration and depression.

For me, my Underground Restaurant is a chance to put into practice some of my political ideals: do-it-yourself culture, making good food available to everyone at a reasonable price, improving the image of vegetarian food. I am probably the only restaurant in the world that reserves cheaper seats for the unemployed, people on benefits, those who may not be able to afford to eat out.

Unlike France, Italy and Spain, there exists a culinary apartheid in Britain. Poorer people are confined to ethnic restaurants, fast food and chains when eating out. London is one of the most expensive cities in the world in which to eat out and most people simply can’t afford to eat at good restaurants. Our food markets, while improving, do not offer the freshness, affordability and diversity of European street markets. A home restaurant in every neighbourhood could be a route to change, raising the status of home-cooked food.

Trust is also important. Many commercial restaurants simply cannot be trusted to provide cooked-from-scratch fresh food or meals for special diets. I cheffed in a ‘vegetarian’ café at festivals that served bacon sandwiches in the morning because they were such a money spinner. The bacon and the vegetarian food were regularly cut up on the same chopping boards, prepared with the same knife. But the fashion for food intolerances can drive the home chef up the wall, too.

Some customers like the idea of exclusivity. Food blogger Krista of Londonelicious describes the appeal for her:

‘I went to Bacchus, but chef Nuno Mendez did not come to the table to personally describe each dish as he did at The Loft. This is way more special.’ This exclusivity comes at a price, though… £120 per head.

Other guests love the idea of illegality, the notion that they could get busted. It’s not so much extreme sport, but the thrill of extreme dining. I have to admit, I do play up this aspect. Guests are asked to memorise a password before they can enter. I tell them that if we get raided by the police, start singing Happy Birthday! (In reality I’ve had policemen come as guests and they don’t have a problem with it!) It evokes memories of the 1920s prohibition era, as does the Argentinean term for underground restaurants, puertas cerradas – ‘closed door restaurants’.