The Rise of the Contemporary Supper Club: dinner for the many or the few?
Like many people, I have a complicated relationship with technology. The ever-smarter algorithms conspire against my attention span as I automatically get sucked into The Scroll-Void. Despite this depressing image, I have found one corner of the internet is worth once again exceeding my screen time limit: Food Instagram.
Increasingly, my feed has been saturated with ‘supper clubs’: small teams catering for more intimate, communal dining experiences. #Supperclub racking up over 592k Instagram posts and 62.7 million TikTok views proves I am not alone.
This explosion stretches back, surprisingly, to the prototypical supper club in Beverly Hills, California, in the 1930s. The end of prohibition in 1933 created a clientele thirsty for the rediscovered bacchanalian revelry of drunken nights. These excelled in the Midwest, serving food in the 20th-century equivalent of 4 a.m. cheesy chips stumbling back from a night out.
Why they chose the name ‘supper clubs’ is unknown. One possible explanation is the connotation of supper as more than utilitarian dining.
In contrast to the banality of dinner, supper clubs simultaneously convey a contradictory sense of effortless simplicity and high-class sophistication.
Pen Vogler, author of Scoff: A History of Food and Class in Britain, explains the historical basis of this. For the English Aristocracy, supper demarcated leisure: the freedom to entertain informally, without set start and end times, to sit with companions for hours picking at light meals, unrestricted by the need to sleep early to face the next exhausting day of servitude or hard labour.
Thus, supper has maintained a sense of implicit grandeur. Its equivalent, the dinner party, the vogue of the 1970s: vol-au-vents, aspic jellies, fondue, and tinned pineapple, veered into the gaudy and passé as the millennium approached. This reputational damage was cemented by satirisation, like the disastrous blue string soup of Bridget Jones’ Diary, and the death knell rung clear by endless weekday re-reruns of Come Dine with Me.
In contrast to the banality of dinner, supper clubs simultaneously convey a contradictory sense of effortless simplicity and high-class sophistication. Design-wise, they aspire to an eclectic style. Think hand-drawn menus, mismatched crockery salvaged from a flea market, wooden tables with gingham runners, wildflower bouquets arranged to look careless, a stripped-back nouveau Mediterranean menu and a preponderance for the organic funk of natural wines.
Thought of cynically, those which run at £50+ per person price tag emanate a vision of affluent epicureanism. As Pen Vogler says, “supposedly informal, but highly engineered, contemporary ‘supper clubs’ enable the rest of us to emulate an upper-class meal”.
Furthermore, concerns over gentrification feed into the debate. Many I saw took place in London neighbourhoods labelled ‘up-and-coming’, such as Dalston or Peckham. This view overlooks the rich, diverse history of minority ethnic populations in these areas. As areas are designated ‘trendy’, residents and their communal spaces are at risk of being priced out by developers and newcomers.
In this way, the meticulously constructed image of connectivity and community may be the façade for an exclusive, perhaps exclusionary, event.
Conversely, the in-built flexibility of the supper club can be its greatest strength. Those who host them can amass creative benefits as they facilitate greater freedom and self-governance than traditional restaurant dining. They can be empowering spaces for those excluded from the industry, as many supper clubs are held by non-classically trained chefs and even home cooks.
The informality of supper clubs compared to restaurant dining can create more open, accessible spaces for socialising; for example, Leeds-based Exhale.Lds, a “DIY, community-centred, non-profit organisation” runs quarterly supper clubs at Rainbow Junktion in Hyde Park. They focus on making a safe, enjoyable environment for all attendees: “At the heart of what we do is trying to create space that encourages communal, loving and caring, freely expressive and intentional environments”. They do not turn anyone away for lack of funds, a great example of working with the needs of the pre-existing community.
Therefore, whilst some serve a narrow clientele, detached from their communities, others harness the format to create truly egalitarian, communal spaces. As with much of the food scene, supper clubs will continue to exist in the contradiction of food as essential to who we are and how we live, and a highly-marketable commodity.
