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

First of all, announce it. Tell your friends and family, and their friends and families. But you also want strangers, don’t you? Otherwise it’s just a dinner party with your mates. So you need to know how to pull in strangers. (Sounds like L’Auberge Rouge, a kind of hoteliers’ Sweeney Todd, doesn’t it?)

New media is your friend. Facebook, Twitter, blogging, Craigslist, Gumtree, Ning, these are all great methods for spreading the word. Start a Facebook group, set up a Twitter account, write a blog. By the time this book comes out there is bound to be some new fashionable social-media method, so find out what it is and use it. Age is no barrier to this: most of these media are user-friendly. Lynn Hill, who started the My Secret Tea Room near Leeds, is in her 60s and adept at making connections with new media.

But don’t forget old media: once you’ve found your feet, let your local newspaper know. You could even put ads up in newsagents and shops. (Sheen supper club did this, got a few snooty remarks but soon filled up with locals.) If you have a particular theme – say, organic seasonal food – then put up a little notice in your nearest organic produce shop.

Get cards printed; I get mine from MOO.com via Flickr. Easy-to-design, small and attractive. Personal marketing: every time you go out, take your cards with you, hand them out, explain your new venture. You could also get brochures done. Flypost, as if for a gig. All this is basic marketing and PR. You want to fill your places. Bums on seats.

Choose a name that is emblematic of your living-room restaurant. Most supper clubs use words like hidden, secret, underground or midnight in their name. This gives an indication of the clandestine and guerilla nature of the operation. Sometimes they call it after the location, such as The Shed or Ahoy there! (on a boat), or the menu served, like The Bruncheon club.

Best not to call the press until you’ve set foot in the kitchen. Go for a soft opening and practise your mistakes in private. (As one of the first, I did not have this advantage. The Guardian and several food bloggers insisted on coming for the first night even though I had explained that I probably wasn’t ready. It really added to the pressure. I had not foreseen the level of interest that my home restaurant would trigger.) However, it has not been PR expertise that got me publicity and renown: I’ve been making it all up as I go along, but I was excited about it, and that enthusiasm conveys itself to others…

It’s also a good idea to do some research. Go and visit other supper clubs. Read up on them if you are too far away to visit. Volunteer to help out for a night or two. I get e-mails all the time asking to work. Lady Grey of the Hidden Tea Room in London offered to take me to lunch to pick my brains. Feeding a cook is a perfect method of extracting information. You will soon work out what tricks and techniques you want to retain and which do not suit you. When I started, there were no others to check out. Now there are…so use them!

2 TAKING BOOKINGS................

Once you have people booking, you will need to work out a method for handling their enquiries. Do be courteous and answer all their e-mails within, say, a 24-hour period. If they have paid all or a portion up-front, remember that they don’t know you. If you don’t reply, they will get anxious, especially if you haven’t given them the address yet. I went to a supper club in Brighton that didn’t give me the address until the morning of the dinner. Anything could have happened, my e-mail could have gone down, I could have been staying the night elsewhere.

Another underground restaurateur didn’t give the address, only literary clues. It turned out she had a blue plaque of a well-known poet on the wall of her house. You could do a treasure hunt of clues, but while a little mystery is quite a good thing, don’t go over the top and exhaust your guests before they arrive!

So, bearing in mind that answering all these e-mails takes up a lot of time that you could be spending in the kitchen practising dishes, get yourself a system. Write a stock response, copy and paste it into each email. Have several replies ready:

1) I’m afraid we do not have space for that date blah blah but will put your name on a waiting list.

2) This is where to pay (bank details) or where to book tickets (web address).

3) Here is the address and time to come. How to get there, a map perhaps or transport directions. You may want to give them a phone number. But be wary of this unless you have someone to answer the phone for you. There’s nothing more annoying than last-minute phone calls from people who think nothing of pestering you endlessly with questions and requests for step-by-step directions to your doorstep. I’ve actually lost friends at my own parties by snarling at them when they called wanting to discuss their love lives, what they should wear etc., just as you are trying to organise everything and get your own make-up on.

4) Any house rules or information you might want to give.

5) Menus. I change them every week and post it up on my blog or on my Facebook group. But they are subject to change; the lack of choice is part of the appeal. You will eat what Mummy tells you!

At the beginning I would have, say, a group of four people booking and each of them would e-mail me twice. That’s eight e-mails for one group. Your head starts to explode and it can be a struggle to stay polite. Early on I had one guest who called me when I was in the bath. I tried to sound professional but he could hear the splashing. Eventually I confessed, ‘Well, this is a home restaurant, it’s not every day you get the chef taking reservations from his bath!’

If you have done a few dinners and want to continue, consider signing up with a ticket agency who will take the pressure off you and answer those e-mails. You will still get e-mails...from, say, people informing you of food allergies or birthdays, but not as many.

I forgot to give my address to one couple. My dinners start at 7.30 p.m. I was cooking all afternoon, but at 8 p.m. I just happened to check my e-mails. There were several desperate messages saying, ‘We’ve booked babysitting and we don’t know where you are! Please please call.’ I felt terrible. They did get here in the end and were rightly given a free bottle of wine.

So a website handling all that is rather a good idea. Unless you’ve got a huge amount of elves working for you for free.

3 PAYMENT.........................

Are you going to allow people to pay on the night? In cash? I knocked that idea on the head after the first week.

I had sold 15 places, the last two places booked only that afternoon. I was turning other people away. The last two people did not turn up! They had got drunk and could not be bothered. A supper club has no walk-in traffic. You need everybody to attend and pay. Profit margins, especially at the beginning, are so tight that you will, as I did, make a loss.

I had already spent the money on ingredients and increased the amount that I was cooking. Straight away I realised I needed a system of prepayment, or I would be losing money every week. One week, Horton Jupiter had ten no-shows. You can’t afford that. Nor do you want to live on the same leftovers for the rest of the week.

It’s not only the money: empty tables and spaces look bad, especially if it’s supposed to be a large mixed table and some people haven’t turned up.