• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1091 0

The word club connotes exclusivity, and within this private realm, it is true that pretty much anything can happen. At a restaurant, “The customer is always right” motto defines how restaurateurs run their businesses: to please the customer, bending over backward sometimes by changing menu items and other details given what’s been most successful. At supper clubs, it could be more common that the creators shape their guests to fit their vision. At one dinner given by A Razor, A Shiny Knife, guests were instructed to come dressed all in white. The clean, sparse loft where the dinner was held was drenched in white, marked by a single long, twenty-two-person table draped in white cloth. Only the kitchen staff (including myself) was dressed in all black. With another supper club called the Underground Food Collective, based in Madison, Wisconsin, guests are often treated to surprise visits from the farmer, or winemaker, who produced some of the evening’s delights. In the case of SOS, our guests—whoever they were—would be the unsuspecting guinea pigs for a highly aphrodisiac-charged, and hopefully delicious, meal.

One day while I was chucking spam e-mails from my in-box, I came to an e-mail with the subject line, “This is not spam, this is Morgan.”

Who the hell was that? I paused for a moment at the DELETE button, then decided to open it.

“Hi, Cathy,” it read. “We met while I was tending bar.”

Oh, right, I remembered. A week or so earlier, I had met up with my friend Scott, a fellow food writer. He’d insisted on going to a certain upscale Manhattan restaurant for a drink because a friend of his worked at the bar and could make “a mean drink.” His friend Morgan.

In the e-mail, Morgan complimented my blog and offered a recipe for a simple black beans and rice dish. I thanked him in a quick reply and told him I’d have to try the recipe sometime. I was used to receiving mail like this from blog readers or new acquaintances and did my best to respond to them all. His response the next day was followed, in a postscript, with a proposal: “Ever thought about Not Drinking Out in New York? If you’re interested, I could do a cocktail demonstration sometime, and invite a few friends over. You could invite friends, too. It could be fun. Let me know.”

I had to agree, it did sound like fun. I hesitated, then shrugged it off—after all, this was a friend of a friend. I wrote back enthusiastically. We chose a night the upcoming week, and I roped Karol into coming along with me for the cocktail tutorial at Morgan’s place.

Up until then, home cocktail making conjured chilling visions of Sean and Meredith’s floor of full liquor bottles. In the last few months of living together, Ben had become a bit of a fancy-booze collector, too. I’d kept my own apartment clean of bottles, to ward against such obsession. As a result, I didn’t know much about making drinks.

The cocktail night turned out to be low-key, informative, and a lot of fun. We made basic, beginner-level cocktails like the old-fashioned, gin and tonic, and whiskey sour. Afterward, Karol and I found ourselves with a newfound appreciation for gin and ringing headaches, and I found my SOS date. That night, after making a few rounds of homemade cocktails, Morgan’s four friends had taken off, and he, Karol, and I had gone to a nearby bar. Karol and I couldn’t help but bring up the subject of our upcoming dinner, though we were tactful to not mention the full extent of SOS. Morgan jumped in to ask about wine pairing for the menu. We both shrugged, not having given it much thought until then. He then offered to act as sommelier, should we need one, and pair each dish with an appropriate wine. It sounded like a great idea.

There was definite chemistry between Morgan and me that night. Over the next few days, we kept up by e-mail and tried to make plans for the next week. It seemed natural to pin Morgan as my SOS “date,” and I urged the rest of the team to hurry up and find theirs soon.

Karol was lagging, having asked one or two people who weren’t able to make the date we’d eventually