What they all shared is that they operated outside the law, cooking and serving food in unlicensed premises. To get around potential prosecution, they asked diners for a contribution (as opposed to charging a set price) towards the meal. Some included the wine but more often than not, they asked diners to bring their own.
There are two types of supper clubs. One traditional, a little like a book club, where a group of friends or acquaintances decide on a menu and cook it to enjoy and discuss together. One of the most famous of these is the Cooking Light Supper Club, which was started by Cooking Light Magazine in 1999. The other type is a more modern concept although by no means new - supper clubs are prevalent in Cuba, for instance, where the best food is found in home ‘restaurants’ - where cooks or chefs prepare elaborate meals for diners to enjoy at a fraction of the price of a restaurant meal.
Diners find out about the supper club nights through the chefs’ website, word of mouth or social media and congregate on the given night, spending a jolly evening alongside complete strangers and enjoying the conviviality that only shared tables and intimate surroundings can create. They eventually get to speak to the chef, who joins diners once he/she has finished cooking, an extra treat that isn’t often forthcoming in a regular restaurant.
I myself jumped on the bandwagon two summers ago, not hoping to eventually open my own restaurant but rather, to give Arab food some recognition as part of a festival of Arabic contemporary art called Shubbak. It was the first time that such a festival was held in London but nowhere in the programme was there a mention of food, which I found surprising. So I decided to introduce festival-goers to the pleasures of Emirati, Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese home cooking. The evenings were a great success but I have to say that the only pioneering thing about it was that I was an Arab chef serving Arab food to paying diners in her own home. I don’t think there were many doing this then, and I suspect there still aren’t very many doing it now.
Where I was a pioneer though was two years ago, when I started a residency as chef at Leighton House during their Nour Festival. I initially thought I could hold supper club nights in the studio where Lord Leighton painted his fabulous paintings but the museum has no kitchen facilities and even though they rent it out for dinners, the health and safety logistics were too complicated for me to attempt to do so. But I was able to hold a hands-on cooking class and several demonstrations in the most beautiful setting a chef could hope for. To date, there has not been another chef in residence, at least not in Leighton House and possibly in no other museum in Britain either.
