They may have boomed post-lockdown, but supper clubs are proving to be no flash in the pan. If you’re craving more intimate, unexpected dining experiences, it’s time to pull up a seat.
If lockdowns taught us one thing, it was just how much we crave connection. Of the many dining trends to arise from that time, supper clubs are proving one of the most enduring.
Often in pop-up spaces, with more home-style cooking, these aren’t restaurants as we know them, but something more intimate.
Two now-legendary Melbourne restaurants started out with supper club formats: Helly Raichura’s Enter Via Laundry, which grew from the self- taught chef’s Box Hill home, and Jung Eun Chae’s Chae, first launched in her tiny Brunswick apartment. At various times, both had waitlists in the thousands.
Meanwhile, Club Sup founder Sophie McIntyre was inspired to create an intimate dinner club as an antidote to Melbourne’s lockdowns, and now hosts supper clubs and similar events nationally, with dinners in Adelaide, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Perth this month alone.
“I think people love supper clubs because they’re over the typical restaurant setting, where you have, like, an hour- and-a-half booking, and you can google the menu before you get there. People want to try something different,” says Jenna Holmes of Pasta Club, which offers private dinner parties in Melbourne and Sydney. Holmes delivers the menu, music and styling in her trademark maximalist style, with diners finding out all only on arrival.
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For cooks like Holmes, supper clubs offer creative freedom. For guests, it’s the dream dinner party, with no clean up.
With Melbourne’s Gruel Club, no two events are the same. Popping up at gallery spaces and venues like Earth Angels Bar, CDMX and Manzé, food writer Quincy Malesovas challenges cooks to explore their food cultures and push the boundaries of a menu.
Upcoming events see Carlton wine bar Henry Sugar explore the possibilities of cooking with soy beans, and a Greek deity-themed cocktail party at Thornbury bar Capers. Malesovas also runs cookbook clubs, inviting guests to prepare different recipes from the same cookbook before coming together for a shared communal feast.
For chef Zosia Orkisz of Zosia Cooks, supper clubs helped her better connect to the people she was feeding. “I think in this day and age, more intimate experiences are what people need to connect,” she says.
“After working in commercial kitchens, I saw the disconnect between chefs’ and guests’ experiences… Turning my supper clubs into a career made more and more sense to me.”
At Orkisz’s regular events in Sydney and Brisbane, diners join strangers at long tables for multi-course Polish-inspired feasts, often only learning the location of the event the day before. Orkisz’s guests come from all age groups and walks of life, “That might usually not interact with each other”.
What brings them together, she says, is that they’re all craving a new experience.
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