Supper Club: Recipes and notes from the underground restaurant. Kerstin Rodgers
as people arrive: light the candles, pour out the initial cocktails, put on the music.
9 THE HOST.........................
One of the biggest assets of an Underground chef is personality. It really helps to be willing to share yourself. Be warm. Be funny. Be cheeky. Boss them about. Sometimes the guests need chivvying along. Remember, it’s your house. As I said before, sometimes you, as the host/ess, need to break the ice. Your guests are waiting for a lead from you. If the vibe is a bit chilly at first, pop out of the kitchen, make a joke. The atmosphere will change in the blink of an eye. It’s called hospitality for a reason.
So do go out and talk to people after the main course, when you can relax to a certain extent. If you are the chef, you can’t do that while you are cooking. Guests like to feel special. People love that personal touch. How often do they get to talk to the chef in a normal restaurant?
If you are feeling generous, go around with some cognac or dessert wine. This is a good opportunity to find out who has come to your house for the night. The kind of guests you have will probably be very interesting. Boring people don’t go to underground restaurants.
Part of being a host is expressing and sharing your interests with your guests. It might be great art or photography on your walls. As my training is a background in photography and travel, my living room has 40 large black-and-white photographs of my travels.
A tip: I’m sure you’ve had dinner parties where you’ve spent so long concentrating on the food that you end up opening the door to your guests in your dressing gown with no make-up and scraggy hair. So...get ready in the morning. I put on make-up, shower and wear something nice covered with an apron, so that if I run out of time, I still look ok. Then you can always just touch up your lipstick and spray on a bit of perfume to hide the cooking smells if you run out of time.
10 GUESTS.........................
My guests come from the internet, they are mostly strangers. Some hosts set rules, such as you must write in with a little biography, give some indication of what you are about, who you are. Other hosts allow only friends and friends of friends to attend. You can do what you feel comfortable with. I’ve never yet had a problem with any of my guests. It can be a little startling for them to sit at a table of strangers, but usually the food and drink and strangeness of being in someone’s living room binds them together. As I’ve mentioned, I also do themes: quizzes, a Marmite menu, an umami menu, an Elvis night. This gives guests something to talk about.
It does help if guests ‘get it’ and are willing to throw themselves into the unconventional spirit of underground restaurants. It’s difficult when they behave as if they are in a normal restaurant and expect staff to be at their beck and call.
One difficulty you need to be prepared for is guests and their ‘allergies’. Allergies are on the rise and, frankly, are the bane of every cook’s life, especially if, as in my case, you do a fixed menu. Of course, anybody in hospitality would want to cater for a genuine food allergy, but you’d be amazed at how many people ‘upgrade’ an aversion to a full-blown allergy in restaurants. Short of demanding that your guest has a blood test on the spot to determine a positive IgE antibody reading, the cook is in a helpless position to rebut these claims.
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