In the past, an invitation to a supper club would bring thoughts of middle-aged women having a potluck dinner and detailing the neighborhood gossip. But New York City has brought supper clubs to a whole new innovative and quirky level. Here, we’ve rounded up 6 of the most unique secret supper clubs, rated more for their usage of clever covert locations than on the exclusivity of an invitation. These range from dinners in reclaimed dumpsters, to private homes to helipads.
1. Pith
Pith is the secret supper club started by Columbia University senior Jonah Reider. When you meet Jonah, you will understand quickly that Pith is unlike other supper clubs in New York City. For one, this is not about profit at all. For $15 a person, you get a five to eight course meal with wine pairings – with level of produce quality and cuisine creativity we’ve found in only some of the city’s most cutting edge restaurants.
Produced four days a week, each dinner was for just four people at a time, which explains the 4,000 person waitlist – after all, Jonah was also ostensibly writing his thesis this semester. Driving it all, as Jonah explained during our dinner, was a curiosity to meet interesting people and explore his culinary passion. He never repeated a dish twice, always evolving and testing new things.
Although he has been evicted from the dorm, Pith continues in a pop-up form at a Tribeca gallery in May 2016, and Jonah plans to find a new home for it in summer 2016.
2. PlaceInvaders
PlaceInvaders is quite a literal name for this supper club which rents private residences and throws a dinner party without the home owner’s knowledge. To keep the whole shebang a secret from the homeowner and from party crashers, guests are asked not to discuss the evening’s events or post about them on social media. To avoid a paper trail, guests learn of the address by way of Snapchat. If you would like to attend, tickets can be purchased by applicants online with a secret code.
The duo behind PlaceInvaders, their identities secret of course, do the cooking, cocktails and the planning, deliberately keeping the groups small and intimate. They’ve deliberately eschewed any marketing but the insiders are starting to get a wind of PlaceInvaders through word of mouth.
3. Salvage Supper Club
Photo by Andrew Hinderaker
For $50, diners at the monthly Salvage Supper Club feast on a six-course meal of expired food like bananas with black skin and stale bread. Keeping with the theme, the sixteen diners eat in a reclaimed dumpster which takes up a few parking spaces in Williamsburg and leave with an education about how they can eat all of the food they purchase. Interestingly enough, because of a law, diners cannot drink
Josh Treuhaft founded Salvage Supper Club to educate New Yorkers about how they waste so much edible food because it is slightly over ripe or a few days past the expiration date. Local restaurants and shops, farmers markets, food co-ops, and cookery schools donate their unwanted food to the supper club. All of the funds raised from the dinners go to Culinary Corps, City Harvest or other food-related a nonprofits.
4. Secret Japanese Hideout via Eatwith
In an eclectic loft in Williamsburg, Ai, a Japanese New Yorker, and her husband host a Japanese supper from $30 per person called Eat With Ai, which was thrust to the international sphere through an article on Messy Nessy. All of the cuisine is Japanese-fusion with some of the ingredients coming from their miniature urban farm they maintain on their rooftop. Her husband, a bike aficionado, is known to give guests a show-and-tell about how to build a bike during the dinner party.
Ai offers various menus ranging from Japanese pub food, to family-style, to a tasting selection and all of her food is either vegetarian or pescaterian. Through word-of-mouth, Ai conjured a following of people eager to sit at the dinner table with her and her husband. Now, you can join the inclusive couple in their comfy loft by going to EatWith.
5. Togolese Dinner After Hours in a Bed Stuy Bodega
When was the last time you had a home cooked Togolese dinner inside a bodega after hours with a group of strangers and a DJ? Probably never. The “WOÉZÕ Comfort” meal is one of the offerings on Feastly, an online platform that aims to reintroduce the home cooked meal, connecting adventurous eaters with local cooks. The WOÉZÕ dinner (pronounced “way-zoh,” cooked by Peace Corps alum Mitch Bloom, takes place monthly in Bed-Stuy Fresh and Local, a grocery store run by neighborhood couple Dylan Ricards and Sheila Akbar. The produce gets pushed to the side and a long communal table is set up just in front of the door. More than just a dinner, WOÉZÕ becomes a way of life as Mitch so convincingly demonstrates. Sign up for Feastly here, and you can get the WOÉZÕ dinner on request.
6. DinnerLab
Dinner Lab periodically opens up memberships, which costs $175 per year. If you’re curious why you should shell out the money in advance, DinnerLab has hosted suppers on helipads, in a church, a motorcycle dealership, even the abandoned South Street Seaport Mall foodcourt, (now demolished), all with top chefs. The upfront membership helps the organization cover overhead costs, because unlike every other startup it seems, it hasn’t accepted outside funding. DinnerLab is located in 10 cities across the United States.
7. The Gastronauts
To attend the Gastronauts Supper Club, you must be willing to stomach basically anything. Previous menu items have included cod sperm and dismembered octopus. The club was created to encourage New Yorkers to get out of their food comfort zone. Often the foods are authentic to a certain country like Tibet or Yemen. The dinners are held at small joints around New York City, sometimes even on the rooftops of those restaurants. The Gastronauts have become quite a popular group with 1,300 members with each monthly dinner serving approximately 70 people.
Photo by Andrew Hinderaker
