Supper Club: Recipes and notes from the underground restaurant

To all the single parents,

you are superheroes!

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Part One – The Notes

Introduction

My Food

The Home Restaurant

The ‘Pop-Up’ Restaurant

Variety

Why Start a Supper Club?

The Story of MsMarmiteLover

How to Start Your Own Underground Restaurant

Cooking Notes

Part Two – The Recipes

Cocktails and Nibbles

Daiquiri

Kir Royale

Butterbeer

Butterscotch Schnapps

Popcorn with Lime & Chipotle Sauce

Crack-Cocaine Padrón Peppers

Chipotle Sauce

Bombay Mix

Five-Seed Roast

Marinated Olives

Dukkah

Baba Ganoush

Pitta Bread

Focaccia Bread Shots

A Word About Flour:

Marmite on Toast with Crispy Seaweed

Bloody Marmitey

Edamame

Nice Touches

Starters and Sides

Baked Jalapeño Poppers

Thai Corn Fritters with Sweet and Sour Cucumber Dipping Sauce

Vadai with Yoghurt and Flaked Jaggery

Butternut Squash & Feta Filo Triangles Edged with Poppy Seeds

Gratin of Salsify

Dolmas

Tempura

Kushi Katsu: Japanese Motorway Café Sarnie

Steamed Artichokes with Dijon Mustard Dressing

Chillies en Nogada

Beef and Spring Onion Chinese Dumplings (From Mama Lan’s Supper Club)

Savoury Yoghurt Granita with Caramelised Pine Nuts, Preserved Lemons and Torn Basil

Gammodoki (From Horton Jupiter)

Yuzu Ceviche

Soups

Marmite French Onion Soup

Vegetable Stock

Roasted Cherry Tomato and Garlic Soup

Sorrel Soup

Thai Green Spinach Soup

Cockaleekie without the Cock!

Magic Wizard Pumpkin Soup

Salads

French Beans with Tofu &Walnut sauce

Palm Heart Salad

Mint, Coriander, Onion &Pomegranate Cachumber

Really Great Caesar Salad

Broad Bean, Feta & Mint salad

Pear, Walnut & Gorgonzola Salad

Mâche with Egg & Dijon Mustard Dressing

Grilled Halloumi & Roasted Pepper Salad

Vegetarian Main Courses

Baked Vacherin (Fondue for Cheats)

Eggplant Parmesan (Melanzane Alla Parmigiana)

Quenelles

Basic Curry Spice Mix

Chilli Sin Carne with all the Works

Salsa Asado

Tomatillo Salsa with Chilli En Adobe

Guacamole

Corn Tortillas

Twitter Curry (From Spicy Hardeep Singh Kholi)

Kissing Chutney

Sikh Salad

Coconut Dahl

Tinda Masala

Jewelled Basmati

Butternut Squash & Blue Cheese Risotto

Fresh Pasta Home-Made

Spinach & Ricotta Cannelloni

Il Timpano

Really Good Mac & Cheese

Crêpes ‘You Creep in, Get a Crêpe and Creep Out ’ Victoria Wood on a Date in a Crêperie.

Fish Main Courses

Gratin Dauphinoise with Smoked Salmon

Curing your Own Salmon

Grilled Sardines with Mint

Salt-Baked Fish

Marmite Cheese on Smoked Haddock

Spaghetti Al Cartoccio

Thai-Style Fish in Banana Leaves with Coconut Rice

Stargazy Pie

Meat Main Courses

Spiced Slow-roasted Leg of Lamb with Mujadara (From The Shed)

Mujadara

Casa Saltshaker Locro (From Casa Saltshaker, Buenos Aires)

Quintessential Chicken (From Ben Greeno)

Shin of Beef Ragù (From Sheen Suppers)

Pork Belly with Sage and Fennel Stuffing (From Plum Kitchen, New Zealand)

Rambling Sunday Roast of Pork Belly with Black Pudding, Thyme and Honey Parsnips and Cider Gravy (From the Rambling Restaurant)

Duck Breast with Rhubarb Compote (From Lex Eats)

Slow-cooked Sirloin Steak with Wholegrain Nut Crust, Roasted Baby Beets and Baby Spinach Catalan, Served with Truffle Potato Purée (From The Loft)

Desserts

Mousse au Chocolat Orange with Cointreau and Choc-dipped Physalis

Tarte Tatin with Crème Fraîche Ice Cream

Crème Fraîche Ice Cream

Bergamot Posset with Crystallised Thyme & Lavender Shortbread

Saffron Kulfi with Almond & Cardamom Tuile Biscuits

Giant Pavlova

Salted Caramel

Clafoutis

Easy Apple Strudel

Chav’s White Chocolate Trifle with Malibu

Candied Oranges, Lemons & Limes

Cheese Course

Rye Crispbread

Fig Compote

Themed Menus

Elvis Night

Deep-fried Peanut Butter Sandwiches

Deep-fried Dill Pickles

Shuna’s Cornbread

Candied Yams

Corn-on-the-Cob

Cheese ‘n‘ Grits

Collard Greens

Blackened Catfish

Two Types of Fries

Brokeback Baked Beans

7UP Salad

Pecan Pie

Midnight Feast: The Black Album

Black Russian Cocktail

Black Olive Tapenade

Black Cod’s Roe on Black Bread

Black Sesame Salmon Balls with an Avocado Oil and Black Vinegar Dipping Sauce

Nori Handrolls Stuffed with Black Rice, Black Kale, Black Carrot and Aubergine

Beluga Lentils with Goat’s Cheese

Squid-ink Tortelloni Stuffed with Goat’s Cheese & Lemon Zest with a Death Trumpet Mushroom Cream Sauce

Marmite Chocolate Cupcakes

Flower Menu

Cava with Sweet Yellow Rocket Flowers or Hibiscus Flowers

Courgette Flowers Stuffed with Goat’s Cheese

Elderflower Champagne

Ginger Beer

Elderflower Fritters

Marigold Bread

Nasturtium Leaf Salad with Marigold petals & plum tomatoes

Asparagus Mimosa

Mint & White Chocolate Ice Cream

Flower Ice Bowl

How to Crystallise Herbs & Flowers

Mint Tea with Pine Nuts

Supper Club Directory

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Picture Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

Part One – The Notes

Introduction

We think of the restaurant as an ancient institution but in fact it dates back only a couple of hundred years to the French Revolution. Chefs emerging from the households of a destroyed aristocratic class no longer had jobs. The very idea of a restaurant at this time was revolutionary: a place where anybody who had the money could pay to eat. Suddenly, traders were sitting cheek by jowl with aristos; housewives next to duchesses. They were being waited on, not by their own private staff but by serveurs, people who would serve anyone with the financial means.

That was the first revolution in eating out. 2009 was the year of the supper club. A new revolution.

London is a newcomer to the supper-club scene, although in the 1930s an experimental dining club ‘The Half Hundred’, held in the modernist Isokon building in Hampstead, was attended by the artists and intellectuals of the day, such as Agatha Christie and Henry Moore.

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 Pie or 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.

Another type of ‘pop-up’ is Latitudinal Cuisine, organised by architect Alex Haw. Nobody pays; it’s based on participation. Every week a supper is held at a different house and the guests bring a dish based on the latitude or longitude announced in a lengthy e-mail essay by Alex. The week I went, this included an eclectic menu based on places ranging from Graz in Austria, the Congo and Svalbard, to Bari in Italy, Sweden and Libya.

For Sam Bompas, of food event artists Bompas & Carr, a pop-up restaurant is an installation, a mix of art and food. He’s held events experimenting with glow-in-the-dark jelly, the history of food, a breathable cocktail and a ‘parliamentary’ pop-up that served cocktails and food and held debates around the time of the election. Each event is innovative and researched. Sam obviously has his ear to the ground in the food world, as he attended my very first dinner, bringing along jellies for the guests.

Pop-up restaurants also include legitimate outdoor pop-ups in marquees, such as The Griffin, which opens to the public for six weeks every summer round the back of Grays Inn, London. This pop-up is more legal than most; its clients are usually barristers and judges.

Variety

There is a huge variety of styles of underground restaurant. Some operate weekly, some monthly, some just when they feel like it. The locations can vary from a council flat, a suburban semi, a bedsit, a château, a shed, a boat, a warehouse. Some underground restaurants can feed 50 people at a time; others are more intimate affairs of 6–10 people. I’ve even held private dinners for two in my garden shed!

The phenomenon is very site specific. Each underground restaurant is as individual as its host…and you have the freedom to fit it around your lifestyle. The style will depend on your space, even the amount of knives and forks you own…

David Clasen serves only 12 people because he happens to own just 12 place settings, three tables and a tiny kitchen. I have a large Victorian garden flat, so can fit up to 30 people at a time in my living room. When the weather is good, we can spill out into my garden and balcony. I host my evenings on a Saturday because my daughter is at school during the week and I felt it might be a little distracting for her to arrive home from school on a weekday faced with a horde of strangers in the living room.

Horton Jupiter can fit 10 people comfortably in his council-flat living room. Horton is in a band, ‘They came from the stars, I saw them…’ and therefore needs weekends off for gigs.

Artist Tony Hornecker’s extraordinary studio space, a little crooked house in the back streets of the East End (soon host to the 2012 Olympics, let’s really show the world how we entertain, eh?), displays his talents as a set designer. The food, although good, is almost secondary to the setting. He sits diners all over his house; couples can even book his bedroom!

Why Start a Supper Club?

Do you make money from a home restaurant? Not much. The home chef hasn’t got access to trade discounts and suppliers because they order in only small amounts. Even so, as the banking system collapsed and parliamentary democracy trembled in the wake of financial scandal, were supper clubs a response to the recession?

Many of the home-restaurant chefs certainly started up because of financial necessity. I’m a single mother, raising a child on a low income. This is a way of starting my own business from my home. Working away from home is always an issue for parents, particularly mothers, so a home restaurant is a perfect entrepreneurial match.

But it has its problems too: the rest of your family must become accustomed to sharing their private space with strangers. There are sacrifices. These I will elaborate on later in the book.

Tony Hornecker, on why he started his home restaurant, The Pale Blue Door, in his studio, says that ‘because of the recession, I wasn’t getting any work. I was literally living on onions. Now at least I can pay my rent.’

While it is probably no coincidence that the ubiquity of supper clubs in Buenos Aires increased in the wake of their financial crisis in 2003, more important, I believe, than the ‘recession story’ is the opportunity to socialise. Most home restaurants are based in big cities, where, despite the crowds, it’s hard to get to know other people. One of the things that surprised me at first was the social-networking aspect of my underground restaurant. As the weeks went on, I realised that larger mixed tables worked better than many small tables. Part of the attraction was meeting other people face to face, people that you may so far have ‘met’ only on the Internet. Even though you are with people you don’t know, there is an instant connection, you are all strangers in a strange land, and there are common subjects – the food, the house, and the cook – to talk about.

It’s also great for lone diners. Women in particular may feel uncomfortable going alone to a restaurant on a Saturday night. Large mixed tables remove the stigma, the embarrassment of dining alone publicly. You won’t feel like a saddo!

The first home-restaurant marriage surely is not far away. (Although once, a couple who had got together six weeks previously at Horton Jupiter’s restaurant split up while at my restaurant. As the hostess, I was left with the responsibility of making sure the abandoned, drunk and scantily dressed ex-girlfriend got home safely.)

I must admit, in the back of my mind, I thought I could meet someone through my supper club. The reality is that I’m too busy in the kitchen, perspiring the welcome cocktail, staggering around in heels and a smeared apron, and shouting at people, for this to have been a successful romantic venture.