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By Root 1150 0

up leftovers with their hands and coated spatulas. Interestingly, the night’s main course had been bear meat, and there was a lot of buzzing around the room about how the new dish had turned out. The cooks had ordered the meat frozen from Exotic Meats USA, on a whim, and were cooking with it for the first time that night. I didn’t try any but heard that it was pretty tasty. I got to sample the dessert, as well as an extra serving of the salad, which was simply flat-leaf parsley sprigs with farmer’s cheese, dressed in a light vinaigrette. I think I took a turn on the rope swing toward the end of the night; I also managed to break one of their plates. Luckily, no one seemed to mind this at all, and overall, I had a terrific time at Whisk and Ladle meeting new people and tasting their food. I’d been a little unsure about arriving at the supper club all alone, but after that night, I knew there was something completely different about this type of experience from what I’d found at the normal bar, restaurant, or club.

I’d heard whispers about secret supper clubs popping up sporadically in several cities, but before going to Whisk and Ladle, I didn’t really understand what they were. I’d heard of the Ghetto Gourmet, which started in San Francisco but had grown several offshoots in other cities, including New York. From descriptions of the club on its website, it sounded like a Bohemian gathering of friends serving humble, homemade food to diners sitting on cushions tossed about one big room. I didn’t know anyone personally involved in Ghetto Gourmet, and through their website I couldn’t tell if the New York City-based chapter was still in operation. Come to think of it, the GRUB dinners at the Rubulad warehouse might be described as a supper club.

Unlike those dinners, however, Whisk and Ladle and the supper clubs I visited afterward operate on a much more formal level. To attend a dinner at Whisk and Ladle, for instance, one needed to hear about the club by word of mouth first. Then prospective dinner guests would sign up for the group’s e-mail list, and when a dinner was announced (roughly twice a month), guests had to RSVP for a seat by e-mail well in advance. If accepted, the diner would receive an e-mail with the secret address and directions to the dinner shortly before its scheduled date. Because Whisk and Ladle had become such a popular underground phenomenon in its two years of serving dinners, only about a quarter of hopeful diners who RSVP’d would score a seat. The menu was listed in each e-mail, usually consisting of five courses with wine and beer, and a cash cocktail bar would be open before and after the dinner. There was a set price, which was usually around $50, depending on the night’s delicacies. I’d heard rumors about some unorthodox reservation-taking habits—like members deleting a chunk of the RSVP e-mails at random, reading only the rest, or choosing certain reservations over others at their own discretion rather than on a first-come, first-served basis.

Supper clubs, “underground restaurants,” or RSVP-only dinner parties for strangers in a home setting are a fairly new trend. But they’re a largely undefined trend, too. In the recent book Secret Suppers: Rogue Chefs and Underground Restaurants in Warehouses, Townhouses, Open Fields, and Everywhere in Between, Jenn Garbee wrote that there is a lot of variation among the numerous supper clubs that have cropped up in the last decade or so around the country, according to the ones she visited or investigated. She determined that there are no distinguishing rules, limitations, or factors behind supper clubs, except that they are not restaurants.

My fascination with supper clubs was complete. I attended a full dinner at Whisk and Ladle later that spring and visited two other underground supper clubs in the city that I’d hunted down.

The first one was held in a quaint two-bedroom apartment with a beautiful backyard, in my old neighborhood of Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Called Ted and Amy’s Supper Club, it was run by resident Kara and her friend Adam, a former