28/9/10 Starting a Supper Club - Why do it?

Post date: 13-Jan-2011 18:49:19

well... I thought I'd blog about starting a supper club. Probably what everyone else does here. But I'm a bit of an odd fish really - started a supper club without ever even having been to one! Can't say that I'm "in the scene" or anything like that at all.

Thing is, I quit my job and am on gardening leave for 3, maybe 6, months. And I have another job to go to so no need to go jobhunting. So I thought well, I'm still being paid. I don't need the money. So why not do something for charity. I mean, I do a lot of charity stuff anyway, committees, school governor and stuff like that, but maybe do something a bit different because there's only so many committees that one person can stand (and before I start to get them all confused... like improved playgrounds for homeless people!)

I thought about what I like to do and, well, it's cook. And entertain. I love it if I cook a good meal for a load of people and they all enjoy it. Even better if they got on and had good conversation too. I've been hosting dinner parties since I was 18 and never looked back from my first "duck in cognac sauce" (where the sauce separated with a layer of fat on the top, but hey, we were students, no-one was complaining in the face of a roast duck, I can assure you!). Even if we were sitting in the back room of the kitchens in a hideous 1960s student halls, with formica tables... it's amazing what some candles can do.

So I had heard of this supper club thing. Pop-up restaurant thing. I thought about it quite a lot, how I would get paid, where would people sit, how would it work. So I worked out that I could get people to donate money to my favourite charity, Medecins Sans Frontieres (they won the Nobel prize by the way, so a really good charity!), in advance. That would kind of secure the booking. Then they could give me a fiver towards food on the night. I figured I could cook a 3 course meal easily for under a fiver (more on that in a later post!), since I live near Ridley Road market where veg and fish (of varying quality, but some of it is good!) is super-cheap.

So that is how I thought it would work. I had my first night last Wednesday so I'll post tomorrow on how that went - and my second night is tomorrow night so I'll post the day after on that!!

Lisha.