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Investigating Underground Supper Clubs

Posted by Lia Bulaong, May 3, 2007 at 12:15 PM

Gourmet's 2 Guys (a.k.a. Alan Sytsma and Ian Knauer) are starting a new series of posts investigating underground supper clubs, secretive reservation-only dinner parties run by chefs and hosted in private residences and rented spaces whose waiting lists are longer than The French Laundry's:

Reservations are often made through an anonymous email address listed on a club's website. If one is charming enough, or has something to offer (say, they're a photographer), one can secure a reservation for a dinner that's sooner, rather than later. We found--only after attending--that our names had been Googled before our reservation was accepted. Our hosts knew where we worked, lived, and in some cases what we looked like. Most importantly, they knew we did not work for the Department of Health.

Supper clubs have also been described as "culinary speakeasies" because the chefs that run them charge money for the meals, but aren't preparing them in licensed commercial kitchens, so they can get busted and fined for what they're doing, hence the secrecy—which is of course what makes the clubs so appealing! They wouldn't be as sexy if they didn't smack faintly of law-breaking, or if the food was trucked in mostly prepared, caterer-style.

Most magazines with editor's blogs use them to post musings and tidbits, stuff that might make into a magazine as part of a letter from the editor or in a sidebar, but rarely anything of real consequence, so I love that Gourmet is posting something on their site that's a) meaty enough to be an actual feature and b) hasn't already appeared in the magazine. It makes me feel like they're really getting the importance of putting your best foot forward on the web, instead of just treating it as somewhere to put old content with new ads.

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Tags: 2 Guys, Gourmet, underground supper clubs