Behind the Scenes at Boston Supper Clubs
I’m in a stranger’s apartment in the North End. Most of the party is already here; I’m 40 minutes late due to Red Line construction. They’re standing in clusters in the small living room eating from plastic plates.
I’m at the “Hundredth Plate Celebration” of Dinner With Friends Boston, a biweekly-ish supper club run by Suraag Srinivas, a consultant who moved to Boston soon after graduating from college in 2020. This is supposedly his hundredth such dinner (with friends), hence the name.
After arriving, I had texted Srinivas so he could let me into his building. Now upstairs, he quickly returns to the sizzling patties on the stove behind the bar. “I’m extremely behind,” he says.
I take a plate and meander. People are clustered in little groups that seem to imply prior acquaintance. Nobody is visibly over 30. After a couple of brief conversations I learn that most of these guests are friends of Srinivas, or friends of a friend. A group introduces themselves as Harvard Law School students, a few are Srinivas’ coworkers, and a couple others are college friends who’ve now settled in Boston for their jobs or school.
When I tell people I’m from The Harvard Crimson, they laugh.
“This is such a student journalist thing,” one guest says, gesturing toward the camera around my neck.
The menu is a conglomerate of foods that were hits in prior dinners, served on cutting boards: a spread of meats, cheeses, and berries; crostini loaded with Boursin and onions; black bean patties with onion and spicy mayo on Hawaiian rolls. Srinivas has set up a little build-your-own-drink section in the back. Dessert is olive oil cake with berry compote.
In recent years, the Boston area has seen a flourishing of private multi-course dinners. They take a variety of forms: a pop-up in a restaurant, a meal around a table. Prices range widely, from $30 to more than $200, and the hosts run the gamut as well from amateur to professional chef. They’re usually run by one or two people and serve anywhere from six to 40 guests. News of these reservation-only events travels primarily through word-of-mouth, and seats are guaranteed through ticket purchases through sites such as Ticket Tailor and Eventbrite.
I found Srinivas’ supper club through a sponsored Instagram ad. Once I saw one, I seemed to see them everywhere. A quick search through social media uncovered Kendall DaCosta’s Out of Many One People, Matthew Bullock’s Southern Pines Supper Club, and Maria Colalancia’s The Aperitivo Society. Over the next weeks, I went to some supper clubs and spoke to many more chefs about where they started and how their dinners have evolved — and whether it’s food, or something else, that keeps them in such high demand.
Conversations with Strangers
Dinner With Friends Boston is modeled on Dinner With Friends NYC, a dinner party gathering that started in May 2022 in New York City aimed at bringing strangers together over dinners. One of his friends attended one when she was in New York and suggested Srinivas do his own version in Boston.
At the time, he had been hosting more informal gatherings for friends of friends, a project he’d had since moving to Boston, when things were just reopening. “I was thinking a lot about how to create a place for people to meet other people in a less formal setting,” he says. Because of Covid, “it couldn’t be a going-out situation, either.”
“People felt more comfortable going to someone’s house and getting dinner with them,” he adds.
“I was cooking a lot because there wasn’t much else to do and I found it a really easy way to meet people and form connections,” Srinivas says.
Today’s crowd of 25 guests is a bit unusual, Srinivas tells me. Usually, his meals are more intimate and sit-down, with 7 to 8 guests; he just so happened to want a larger group for Hundredth Plate.
Srinivas is not the only amateur-run supper club in Boston, though, at around $30 a dinner, it is probably the most affordable. Maria Colalancia’s The Aperitivo Society, a step up the pricing rung, ranges from $80 to $150 per dinner.
There’s a blend of reasons why the amateur chef might want to start a supper club. Srinivas and Colalancia both point to their backgrounds; they both grew up in families that valued sharing food and eating meals together. Growing up, Srinivas’ family always had people over; “it was just expected that my sister and I would cook and help out with whatever event that we were having,” he says.
Similarly, when she was interviewed on the podcast “Happenstance,” Colalancia says that she grew up in a “huge family, Italian on my dad’s side, Irish-Croatian on my mom’s side. Just gathering and hosting and spending time with people you love was a huge part of my upbringing.”
Colalancia founded The Aperitivo Society in January 2023, after her first year of living in Boston, to find a sense of connection she was “craving.” On its website, Aperitivo Society bills itself as a group in the greater Boston area “focused on providing curated dining experiences.” It’s a stylized roughly-biweekly club arranged around a theme, recent ones are “Salem Spice Trade,” a storytelling session and meal hosted in a Salem home; or “An Evening Of Food and Fashion,” hosted in conjunction with clothing rental marketplace “Rotate Your Closet,” themed as a“Met Gala afterparty.”
“[The Aperitivo Society] was kind of thrilling and kind of fun, and it set the tone for what this year has been for me,” Colalancia says on “Happenstance.”
“It’s been beyond my wildest dreams.”
‘Chef’s Table’
The day after Dinner With Friends, I make my way down to Quincy to attend Out of Many One People’s event “Behind the Line,” the first sitting for private chef Kendall DaCosta’s newest series of dinners tailored toward a smaller gathering of 10 people. The dinner is six courses with six cocktails. It’s hosted in an event space in an apartment complex right outside the Quincy Adams T stop.
DaCosta’s assistant today is his mixologist Carolina Mejía, whose day job is in real estate but real joy is in food. She’s making drinks inspired by her Colombian heritage.
DaCosta envisions this event to be a “chef’s table” where attendees can see the food getting made right in front of them. “Behind the Line” is also somewhat of an anomaly for DaCosta’s supper clubs, which tend to host 25 to 30 people, as a private seating in a restaurant space, where he’s still cooking all the food but sequestered in a kitchen.
Dinner starts at 5 p.m., and guests file in shortly after. For most, this is their first time joining Out of Many One People, and also their first at any event of this sort. They’re middle-aged, and three pairs came as couples; it’s a bit of a date-night event.
Like at Srinivas’, I’m largely ignored, but in this room, it’s less because I’m a stranger and more because I, with a camera around my neck (again), am clearly not here to eat, and therefore, clearly not a guest at the supper club. People aren’t here so much to make friends as they are to eat. For a price tag of $200, that’s to be expected.
DaCosta tells the group about the premise behind Out of Many One People — that you could watch the chef cook. “This is like a friend cooking for you,” he says.
The attendees talk a bit amongst themselves. They trade their favorite restaurant recommendations, and what other nice dinners they’ve been to. At one point someone asks if they’ve been to any previous Out of Many One People events. Head shakes around the table. DaCosta says one repeat customer who’s been there since the beginning is coming to this dinner but is 30 minutes late.
While Mejía serves a drink course, DaCosta shows me the menu he planned: it’s in the Notes app on his phone, with a green check mark next to each item to mark it as finished prepping. He takes full advantage of the supper club as a way to get experimental. One dish pairs bison carpaccio with Dorito powder and thinly-sliced rounds of Fuyu persimmon.
DaCosta started his supper club informally in 2020, when kitchen work was widely unavailable due to the pandemic. While cooking for his friends, DaCosta found an Instagram page called Secret Supper, which runs private suppers around the world, and he thought he would try it himself. He started Out of Many One People at Lucille Wine Shop in Lynn, and then moved to Nzuko in Watertown. Now it’s hosted at Nook in Somerville’s Bow Market. He wants to make it a whole experience: he brings in Berklee musicians and sets up rotating art galleries. Mostly, though, he likes running these because he’s able to have more personal interactions with guests, which he can’t get in a more traditional restaurant setting.
“People want to see the chef happy and enjoying what he’s doing,” DaCosta says of his decision to start a supper club. “When you cook food with a smile on your face, that food is going to taste better than anything.”
Reinventing Dining
Around Boston, supper clubs run in two broad genres: ones run by amateur chefs, typically out of a private home or sometimes a rented space; and ones run by professionally-trained chefs, either as a pop-up in a restaurant or hosted in a rented space.
The iteration that appears inside restaurants is often operated by a chef testing out a new concept or chasing a vision that they may not have enough freedom to explore through regular restaurant operations. DaCosta’s Out of Many One People Supper Club, named as a nod to his Jamaican heritage, explores how “harmonious” flavors can be from all over the world. Chef Matthew Bullock, who runs Southern Pines Supper Club hosted at the restaurant Forage, sees his menus as a celebration of Southern cuisine.
They’re not the only ones who took advantage of the supper club to explore cuisine. Chef Pao Thampitak, who also works at Comfort Kitchen, runs a family-style supper club named Gaaeng out of his own home. Each supper club is themed around a regional cuisine in Thailand. Roving dessert chef T Lawrence-Simon does private five-course tastings, and occasionally pairs up with others — he did an event with Aperitivo Society in October.
Sometimes, again, they’re just intimate spaces for gathering with a good meal — Lonely Hearts Supper Club, hosted at Rebel Rebel Wine Bar in Somerville, offers up “an evening for conversation, indulgences, and the thrill of saying hello to someone new,” complete with food, wine, and sometimes tarot readings.
What makes supper clubs so compelling for their chefs is, in part, their relatively lower barrier to entry. “It’s much easier and more financially accessible to do pop-ups because to do a restaurant you need diners and significant funding,” says Bullock, adding that even if he didn’t have the support of Forage, he would’ve eventually started a supper club in one way or another.
And for people like Mejía, who has a full-time job in another industry, the more flexible schedule allows her to balance her work life and her personal life.
For DaCosta and Lawrence-Simon, the pandemic also provided a bit of a push. Though largely seen as a negative for the restaurant industry, the pandemic allowed people like DaCosta and Lawrence-Simon to reimagine their professions. Without a brick-and-mortar, they found ways to extract what they enjoyed most about their culinary vocation. Supper clubs offered both a reprieve from the high-pressure kitchen and an opportunity to venture into new culinary territory.
“Pretty much everyone is figuring out there are way more options than anyone was choosing before,” Lawrence-Simon says.
Private supper clubs are legally a bit of a gray area. They’re not illegal, but they technically bypass the strict zoning and food safety laws that restaurants must follow. You get around this by getting a food-safe certification, but not everyone does. Many supper clubs bill themselves, instead, as an informal gathering with friends whose contributions cover the cost of getting ingredients and food preparation. Most are BYOB, because you require a liquor license to be able to serve liquor. As a result, supper clubs have traditionally been quite hush-hush.
Boston’s supper clubs, generally, are relatively forthcoming, with most posting their meetings publicly.
This desire to host has been equally, if not even more strongly, matched by a desire to receive. Colalancia’s first Aperitivo Society post on TikTok received interest from 700 people, of which a lucky 17 were able to come together for a charcuterie dinner. Srinivas’ dinners generally sell out a week before the date. Tickets for DaCosta’s, Bullock’s, and Thampitak’s supper clubs are perpetually limited or sold out.
Supper clubs’ attendees’ willingness to seek such arrangements may also, in part, be a result of the pandemic. Lawrence-Simon jokes that if before the pandemic someone invited you to some private meal hosted out of someone’s home, “You’d be like, ‘Am I going to lose a kidney?’” But now, he says, “Our acceptance for taking a little bit of a leap is a lot higher.”
End of the Night
My grandfather always said the best way to get to know someone is to open up a bottle of wine and sit down at a table and talk to them,” Colalancia tells “Happenstance.” To her, finding a common interest with another can come from “something as simple as sitting down and breaking bread.”
Colalancia points out the impersonality of modern meals, in part due to technology. “We get so caught up in ‘oh, I’ll just put this in the microwave, and then I’ll work while I do this. I’ll sit on the couch and watch TV while I eat,’” she says on the podcast. “It just becomes this mindless, disconnected action.” But, if sitting down with another, “It’s such a better experience and so much more fulfilling.”
At Dinner With Friends, I meet Jinia Sarkar, a longtime college friend of Srinivas. Though a good chunk of attendees are first-timers, this is Sarkar’s “third or fourth” such dinner. After you graduate college, Sarkar tells me, there aren’t a lot of ways to meet other people, make friends. That’s what makes Srinivas’ space so special.
I make another round: there’s a stack of bingo sheets in the back with fun facts submitted by each of the attendees, accompanied by the instructions to tick off a box every time you find the owner of the fun fact. The girls I met when I came in are now talking to the group of law students, bingo sheets in hand.
Aperitivo Society has done similarly for people seeking friends. Aaliyah Ace Hoo Kim moved from Toronto to Boston earlier this year. She does not typically dine out, but she found Aperitivo Society through someone she followed on Instagram, and attended a dinner in September 2023. “I wanted to go because making friends as an adult is hard and this felt like [an] easy low-pressure way to meet people in Boston who all felt the same way,” Kim writes in an Instagram direct message.
Anika Mian, who also attended an Aperitivo Society event, concurs: she bought a ticket to meet new friends, and she managed to bump into someone who went to the same university.
At DaCosta’s dinner, when I ask Mejía what kind of people she’s met working with DaCosta, she tells me there are too many to list — people from all walks of life.
Supper clubs, then, encapsulate a two-way desire for community and intimacy. They move what might be a restaurant dinner into a private space to achieve this analog connection. To our modern eating culture, this is a novelty, but in reality supper clubs are a revival of an older way of meeting people, of forming relationships.
To the extent that supper clubs are reinventing dining in Boston, however, there’s still a ways to go. “This is not a hugely profitable venture,” Srinivas says, adding that he generally operates at a slight loss, only asking attendees to cover ingredient costs. Supper clubs in general aren’t cheap to run; a combination of gathering ingredients, renting spaces, and the irregular schedule pushes prices up. Lonely Hearts Supper Clubs run upward of $80 a sitting, and DaCosta’s go for more than $175. Yet, DaCosta is still a private chef because that’s “what pays for the supper clubs,” he says, and Srinivas and Colalancia don’t have any plans to quit their day jobs soon.
The higher price points are potentially prohibitive for attendees, though Kim and Mian agree that, in their cases, it’s money well spent.
I can kind of see it, that kind of intention to sit down and share a meal with someone. The apartments are warmed by the presence of the people in them. When DaCosta isn’t talking through the next dish, or entertaining the guests between courses, he chats with me and jokes with Mejía. He shows me how to bread jackfruit for the mock fried chicken dish. I compliment Mejía on her chartreuse nails.
At Srinivas’, a girl makes me a drink using Chambord. Chatter bubbles up with the night.
When I leave Srinivas’, I pass a girl standing under a neon pizzeria sign, turning her face up toward the hot lights. My fingers still smell like the berry compote from the cake I had eaten with my hands. The air is chilly, but I feel warm.
— Magazine writer Vicki Xu can be reached at vicki.xu@thecrimson.com. Follow her @vicku___.