Supper Clubs are dead, (in the way I use the term)

I’m changing, and learning, and using eggs as a metaphor, plus the much Dm-ed about Elote Chutney recipe

(A picture for posterity: seen here me with a cast iron, presenting quail I just cooked outdoors, taken by the very talented Nitya Jain)

My last supper club was not a dinner but a brunch, outside on a farm. I love cooking outside, most of my supper club career has been built on outdoor cooking, it’s the territory of it. This is a very brief but important prologue to the rest of this post.

What am I called now?

I’m one of those chefs that’s hard to categorize because I’ve been in the game forever; 13 years professionally cooking. I’ve refused a lot of restaurant offers, though all of my training was restaurant experience. Coming up through the ranks, after a grueling stint at a new school meets old school Italian place in Dallas, I went to Austin and started as a dishwasher at Dai Due. I cut through because I didn’t mind washing a ton of dishes if I could just get the opportunity to touch food. I got that opportunity by arriving there an hour before my shift started and working on parts of the prep list that would be helpful to the team, it served me well because of that tenacity. I’m a Chef with a glitch, old school restaurant kitchen training and yet refusing to go down a path that’s pretty well formulated.

My reasons are solid, and varied and definitely for another time.

But the most important factor was I saw for myself someone that could use the internet, and supper clubs to solidify my place in this scene. And though I’ve had many iterations of my business , (farmers market stand, food trailer, giant dinner parties to more intimate settings), I have always made sure to keep a supper club in the tuck. And as I continued my path, something really amazing happened, the market for supper clubs blew up, and people started using the word “pop up” more to mean supper club and supper club started to have it’s own new definition. (Maybe actually just going back to the original definition, meaning, a club that holds Prix Fixe dinners instead of ticketed events).

And as that became more clear in these past couple years, I had to really figure out what does that make me and the thing I do. Fine, supper clubs have a different connotation now, but the word “pop up” still feels too hobbyist wants to cook a meal, (I am the people’s champ and all, but I’m just saying what a former line cook sees, also another note, a lot of these hobbyists out market me so no shade, just not what I am). So the question is still: what is the word that describes what I do now?

I have no idea. I’ve often described supper clubs as an experience but also don’t want to use that word, as it’s overused on all these corporate platforms housing chefs like myself. Enter a thesaurus and their suggestions make me humor questions like, “Am I throwing dinner happenings? A dinner occurrence?” Honestly, that just sounds like a medical emergency.

But the lesson I did learn in my very long indie-chef-with-no-home career is that uncertainty doesn’t necessarily beckon or beget answers and I need to continue and think, stare into the eyes of my demon cat for that word to sort of appear. Uncertainty is after all one of my favorite phases in creativity.

Take my last dinner occurrence, which was brunch; the last time I fed the public was 1/6/24, and given my proclivity to cooking outside on a farm, I am used to constantly improvising dishes on the fly. One dish called for soft boiled farm eggs which, with January wind, an outside grill and fresh eggs, means peeling is a doomed venture. And what happened was a far better product. As I was peeling the eggs, it became increasingly apparent that not only were they underdone, they were not done at all. However, you could still peel a bit of the shell, and then let the rest of the egg drop into a quart deli. After being whipped, and hitting a hot cast iron with plenty of fat, I got the most luxurious scrambles I’ve had. I wondered what would happen if I did it on purpose. A few tweaks to the happy accident and maybe we add to that soft scramble repertoire, (meaning, there are literally a thousand ways to skin an egg, which is definitely the saying).

And is, dear dear readers, the inspo for the recipes you’ll be getting in this newsletter, it’s a twofer, in order to make some very very very good South Indian style breakfast tacos.

That’s all I have for now, two recipes, and the burning abyss that is my cat’s pupils in which I’m sure I’ll find the perfect alternative to “Deepa Shridhar’s One Time Only Dinner Occurrence”

Stay tuned y’all, 2024 is about to get wild.

• Coming up on this substack:

  • A new subsection, with a special announcement!

  • Podcast episode for the weekend

  • The first video wine review

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Recipes below for Elote Chutney & Twice Cooked, Perfect Breakfast Eggs