supa suppa club kids

11.18.09

I just attended a supper club and decided to write about it. Not a food critic. Don’t have the descriptive vocabulary, knowledge of culinary anthropology, jazzy conversation skills to chat up hot-shit chefs, or multi-sensory memory for the innumerable intricacies that distinguish flavors. However, I breathe in/savor balanced, complexly flavored dishes from anywhere with as much subtle gusto as the most hardcore food snobs (except for when food is looking at me like it was that one time in Chinatown, then I puss out).

A revelation, the past two weeks provided witness to some of the stages of a supper club. The prep kitchen is like a time-lapse sculptural installation. There is O.C.D. preparation on one of those loco-socio planes that takes hearty, voluminous farm deliveries, and diminishes them into mysterious sauces. I saw still life accidentally arranged in an almost absurdly surreal Renaissance style. Various vegetables, herbs, fruits, exploding colors surrounding a massive pile of greens rested in the winter light of the prep kitchen. The smell of onions, caramel, the weirdly masochistic rhythm of herky-jerky blenders, and heat filled the building. You might guess the menu was tied into Fall.

The working concept of this supper club was to embrace the experience of intimate dining. It had the effect of shelving the expectations that come with restaurants-basically all out efforts to consolidate everything into a tight theme that seems to end up taking the soul out of the place. Really old-school principles of work exchange are the driving force of a supper, except that those involved seem to not think of this as work, but really art as life/art of living. The place is limited, because it is someone’s apartment, but it expands backwards in time. You feel like you have gone back to the old American concept of having house and hold, pleasure and business, in the same place. Normally, nowadays, anyway, you keep work at work, because work sucks usually. Here, work has some other purpose amongst all of the participants and envigorates them.

Supper club means you might be socializing over the course of 3 to 4 or so hours, but when was the last time you did that without regretting the tab and spending a shitload? You can spend way more time with your friends without acting like an shithead and have just as much fun. This is a setting where some cool, interesting people get together on a level that is not so easily obtainable in the city most of the time, and it doesn’t cost too much fuckin money.