Supper Club: Recipes and notes from the underground restaurant. Kerstin Rodgers
For £40 that’s not bad value. The point is, you can afford the whole experience. In conventional restaurants, a lot of mental arithmetic is involved, trying to figure out if you should share a starter, miss out pudding, have coffee at home. Those little bits really add up and that is how normal restaurants make their money, with the drink, the desserts and the coffees…in short, the extras. It can make dining a frustrating experience. Even when restaurants do fixed menus, frequently there are ‘supplements’ that are added on, generally for the dish you really want.
Other times I have done tapas or meze, up to 12 small courses.
SUPPLIERS AND INGREDIENTS.........................
So you’ve made a shopping list. But how much to buy? Another difficulty. In a conventional restaurant, what you don’t sell one night, you can sell the next. For an occasional supper club you have to get it right. Only experience can tell you that.
And where are you going to buy, say, 30 artichokes for your starters? They cost a fortune in the supermarket. Suppliers are the bane of most restaurants. Reliable suppliers are the most important element of any business. If you do have connections to professional chefs or kitchens, ask them who their suppliers are...and whether they mind adding on an order for you. You will get better deals and normally they deliver to your doorstep. That’s a huge relief when prepping can take up so much time, and you don’t want to be popping out to the shops every 5 minutes.
My local organic vegetable box scheme guy came to a dinner. He loved the concept and will now do me bulk prices. It does take a while to build these relationships but they are invaluable. Repay favours in kind, invite them to a dinner!
I do a mix of shopping between the local organic veg supplier and my local street markets. Going to a street market can be very inspirational when you are feeling a bit flat, a bit ‘What the hell shall I cook this week?’
Use good ingredients. Don’t skimp on quality. If your ingredients are good, you can’t go too far wrong. One supper club I read about didn’t cook anything. They just ordered great cheeses, hams, salamis, bread, salads, chutneys, smoked fish and set it out picnic-style.
If you or your friends have gardens or allotments, ask them to sell you their excess.
I do buy from large multi-national supermarkets sometimes. It’s convenient and they deliver, saving time for you. But I try not to do so. I feel this whole ‘movement’ is about circumventing large-scale corporations.
PLAN YOUR MENU.........................
Decide what kind of food, how many courses. When you know how many people you have coming, multiply whatever recipe you are doing to make that number of servings. Make a little extra. Many home restaurants do serve seconds, just like your mum would. Better to have more than less.
Think about your equipment in the context of your menu. Remember you have only a domestic kitchen. Plan your menu around your oven/cooker/fridge capacity. If you are doing three courses, have your menu balanced around hot and cold dishes. This relieves the pressure on your oven. So think it through. Maybe you want to start with a soup that can be made on the hob, a main that can be baked in the oven and a cold pudding.
A soup can also be prepared in advance and set aside; the salad won’t use up precious oven or hob space. Dessert can also be pre-prepped, made the day before.
Then prep. For your first meals, depending on how many people you have, give yourself two days. Make a ‘countdown’ of timings, what needs to be done first until last, and tick off tasks as you complete them. Obviously prep the stuff that stays less fresh last. Maybe part-cook some dishes and finish them off on the night.
Word of advice: don’t do pasta, unless it is baked, for more than eight people. It’s too hard to make it al dente for any more than that.
Yes, the food is important, but if they just want good food they can go to a conventional restaurant. What is essential is attention to detail, character, personality, intimacy, personal touches and…humour! You are really going to need that.
PORTION CONTROL.........................
This can be really hard to work out. Serve some dishes family-style. That is: a big plate in the middle for people to share. People love that, it encourages conversation.
Dishes that are plated-up obviously need to be more or less equal portions. I normally do this by eye, but you can also weigh them. Use one of those nifty digital scales on the counter and weigh each portion before putting it on a plate. This does slow things down but can be useful.
I always overestimate how much people want to eat. I have a morbid fear of people going home hungry, feeling ripped off. Once, a helper sent out very small portions of a starter. I took over and the rest of the starters were more generous. I didn’t know how to handle the situation with the poor diners that only had tiny portions, I was too embarrassed to take the plates back and put more food on them. Now I would go up to the diners and say that was a mistake, give me your plates back and I’ll put on some more! An underground restaurant doesn’t have to be a seamless operation. Mistakes are ok, they are even funny.
For plating up, you need a lot of counter space. If you haven’t got much space, use an ironing board, which is a nice long stretch to add to your counter length (make sure it’s steady), or even the floor if necessary. I’ve kept dishes needed for later covered on the floor in a corner.
Warm the plates if you can. I use an Aga and so I have the simmering oven for this, but you can also use the bottom of a conventional oven. This will keep the food warmer for longer, which is important if you have several tables. You don’t want the last few tables to get cold food.
Another trick about plating up is to have the plates that are ready to go out nearest to the door. It’s obvious I know, but it took me weeks to work that one out! In the panic, I often ended up doing it the wrong way around and the front-of-house would have to go around me to grab the plates.
SLOW FOOD.........................
I don’t ‘turn tables’. I believe in taking time over your food. I like a restaurant where you feel you could stay all night if you wanted. The table is yours for the night, as long as you want (within reason, although I have had people stay the night when they are too drunk to make their way home).
Send food out with short intervals, say 20–30 minutes between courses. In a normal restaurant it’s usually 15 minutes between courses, but there they want the table back. On the one hand you don’t want to rush people, on the other, you don’t want them sitting there twiddling their thumbs. The front-of-house should be able to gauge and tell the cook when people are ready for their next course, when their plates are empty and they are starting to get restless.
Now, this being a home restaurant and not necessarily a slick machine, sometimes there will be delays. Sometimes there’s pressure: one thing after another goes wrong. It can be true ‘seat of your pants’ stuff, guerrilla cookery, and there have been moments when I worried that I’d have to order take-out for all my guests. One supper-club host told guests that dessert had gone wrong and so they were all getting a packet of chocolate buttons each. Did the trick, people laughed, and who doesn’t like chocolate buttons?