Kerstin Rodgers - Supper Club - Recipes and notes from the underground restaurant

In fact, the very idea of food being important to British culture is quite a recent phenomenon. Britain leads the world in protesting against GM foods and declining fish stocks, while also promoting vegetarianism, animal rights and the growing of your own vegetables. At the same time, Britain, especially London, is a powerhouse of youth and alternative culture. Underground restaurants were just waiting to happen…

Home restaurants have been popular in Latin America since the Cuban revolution, where paladares (Spanish for ‘roof of the mouth’ or ‘palate’) were set up in response to government restrictions and the American embargo.

The pioneers of this phenomenon in London were Horton Jupiter, musician and host of supper club The Secret Ingredient, and me, under my blogging pseudonym of MsMarmiteLover. We both sprang from an alternative sub-culture in London where people lived cheaply, ate at donation-only squat cafés and ‘skipped’ food from supermarket bins (‘dumpster diving’), partly in response to sheer poverty, but also as a protest against consumer waste.

In January 2009, Horton opened his living room to strangers. Two weeks later I did the same thing. Now a new home restaurant or pop-up is starting every week in London, and is gradually rippling out to the rest of Britain. I get daily e-mails from all over the country, asking me advice on how to set up a home restaurant. In this book I set out a ‘how to’, a manual.

When I started The Underground Restaurant in January 2009, I announced it on my blog and was shocked when a hidden readership emerged out of the digital woodwork and left comments, asking if they could attend the first dinner. Things continued from there. It was difficult to handle the onslaught of interest from the world’s media at the same time as working out how to run a restaurant in my living room.

I called my living-room diner ‘The Underground Restaurant’, which has become a generic name for this type of restaurant. It’s not really a restaurant, more a table d’hôte with a fixed menu. It’s not literally ‘underground’ either (I have been asked this!), but conceptually, in the 60s counter-culture sense. The legality of supper clubs is not yet clear and the risks will be explored later in this book.

My Food

I try to avoid classic restaurant dishes. I’ll make things that restaurants don’t have the time or business model to make, like Stargazy Pieor a Croquembouche. Another difference from the average restaurant: I don’t cook or eat meat, I’m a pescatarian. Things like paté, liver, kidneys, faggots and gristle in my favourite spaghetti sauce always revolted me. I feel uncomfortable with eating animals. I have to suspend my imagination even to eat fish, but I do like the taste. I’m not a proselytising vegetarian, I’ve had relationships with meat-eaters, snogged them and everything. But you won’t find any meat recipes from me in this book. Fear not, there are guest meat recipes from other supper clubs.

As the chef/patronne of my supper club, I don’t feel obliged to serve meat. I can cook whatever I feel like. I often make themed meals based on the season, the date (eg Feast of the Assumption), popular culture (film night, Elvis, Patrick O’Brian) a type of food, (umami night) or a nationality (Arabian night).

At first, I charged very little and made a loss; I could not continue like that. I now charge a price comparable with a restaurant, but at least you know you are getting everything, the whole experience – from aperitif to coffee – included. It’s not cheaper, but why should it be? To dine at The Underground Restaurant is a unique experience. I don’t ‘turn tables’: you have a table for the night. It’s economic because you can bring your own wine, and you come secure in the knowledge that you have paid for every aspect of the meal. In restaurants people often share a dessert or decide to save money by having coffee at home.

At a home restaurant, people have to come with realistic expectations; it’s not a normal restaurant. For instance, I had an Italian family come for a brunch: one asked for a latte, the other an espresso. I laughed. I don’t have a big expensive coffee machine. You eat what I give you. It’s more like going to your mum’s house (if your mum was stylish and an original cook).

If going to a supper club was initially a novelty, people are getting used to the fact that home restaurants now form part of the eating-out landscape. Culturally, home restaurants are a boon for tourists: you can eat in English homes and learn about the British in this way.

The Home Restaurant

There are different types of underground restaurant. The ‘home restaurant’ is, for me, the most interesting, intimate and authentic of the supper-club genre.

The notion of the home as a private space is quite recent, only since Victorian times. The home restaurant is blurring the lines between public, work and family space. You are welcoming complete strangers into your home. Your taste in décor, your books, your music taste, your crockery, your bathroom toiletries, even your underwear (if, like me, you sometimes forget to tidy it from the drying line) is open to inspection.

The home restaurant appeals to the foodie and the voyeur. It is as if the TV programme Come Dine With Me (in which strangers eat at someone’s house and award them points) has mated with Masterchef (the TV cookery competition for amateur chefs hoping to become professional) and Through the Keyhole (in which the camera films inside a private home and a panel has to guess the celebrity to whom it belongs).

At a home restaurant, the food is usually cooked by a talented amateur or a wannabe professional. It can be a rehearsal for opening a commercial restaurant. In the case of Nuno Mendez, chef of former restaurant Bacchus, his home restaurant (supper club The Loft) was a way of testing out menus in preparation for opening his subsequent restaurant Viajante. His restaurant now open, Nuno retained The Loft as a showcase for talented young chefs.

For David Clasen, who has been running the supper club First Weekend since 2003, his home restaurant is ‘a slow burn. I’m building up skills, menus and a clientele for the part-time restaurant I hope to open in a few years’.

Even pop stars’ wives are getting in on the act: Ronnie Wood’s ex-wife Jo Wood has opened up her mansion and gardens to the public for ‘Mrs Paisley’s Lashings’. Does Jo, who has cooked nutritional food for The Rolling Stones on tour, stand sweating behind the stove? No, she has hired in a pro, Arthur Potts Dawson, from Kings Cross restaurant Acorn House. The price is equally starry…£160 per person. Doubtless, guests are hoping to be sat next to diners like Mick Jagger, who happens to be Arthur Potts Dawson’s uncle.

The ‘Pop-Up’ Restaurant

Occurring in unusual places – an abandoned shop, a boathouse, a garden or a hired location – it’s ‘pop-up’ because it is temporary, either in terms of the space or the amount of time it will remain open. Frequently the chefs are professionals and the waiting staff experienced. Prices tend to be higher. But it is a great opportunity for young chefs without their own restaurants to showcase their food.