It¡¯s A Secret! How Exclusive Supper Clubs Win Over Restaurants

When Prachi and Saloni Gupta decided to share their love for food with guests three months ago, they were expecting a fairly slow response. But their venture, House of M¨¢l¨¤, is now booked out months in advance. They have a 1,000+ waitlist, despite upgrading the dinner table at their Khar home to an eight-seater and opening up lunch slots. House of M¨¢l¨¤ opens for bookings periodically through their Instagram page and charges ?2,500 per head. The Guptas still can¡¯t quite fathom Mumbai¡¯s response to the intimate dining experience offered by their Sichuan vegetarian supper club.

House of M¨¢l¨¤ is among a handful of supper clubs in metro cities like Mumbai, Bengaluru, and New Delhi, where home chefs open up their houses to diners for a gourmet meal with a side of banter.

Home dining experiences aren¡¯t new. They last had a moment around 2015-16 when two formal ventures¡ªBangalore's Door Number and Mumbai-based Authenticook¡ªconnected interested diners with locals making specialty meals. On Door Number, founded by Rohan Tyagi, Rajat Shukla, and Smruthi Gargi Eswar, anyone could be a host: One of their offerings was a neighbourhood walk in Bengaluru¡¯s tree-lined Richards Town and breakfast with editor Samar Halarnkar. Authenticook, like Door Number, also used a peer-to-peer model, inviting both hosts and diners to sign up. Earlier this year, they made a pivot to the delivery model, with meals prepared by home chefs. Both ventures, as we checked, are now defunct.

The Satori Supper Club

¡°We now prefer to call it a supper club,¡± said Marian D¡¯costa, who runs Aiyo Patrao in Mumbai. ¡°It sounds intimate but also structured.¡± Most of these ventures sprang up between mid-last year and early this year. They are characterised by limited seating (eight to ten covers) and announce slots primarily through Instagram. The supper club hosts are rarely restaurateurs and don¡¯t necessarily come from a culinary background, but they have a shared love for food and travel.

Sing For Your Supper

Aditya Ramakrishnan¡¯s M¨¢ L¨¤ Kitchen Supper Club (no connection to the House of M¨¢l¨¤) began as a means to showcase his wife¡¯s culture to the residents of Bengaluru. Dongli Zhang, whom he met during his time as a student at Stanford University, belongs to Chengdu, the capital of the Sichuan province in China. ¡°None of the restaurants here reminded her of food from home,¡± he said. So the couple took matters into their own hands.

Their first edition in December last year attracted only two diners. But Ramakrishnan soon quit his job at Amazon and now hosts at least two dining experiences every week, with eight diners at the table. He cooks, plans, and manages their Instagram account. Zhang helps out with the service on the five- to seven-course tasting menu. ¡°Sichuan food has 24 different profiles. M¨¢l¨¤ is one of them. ¡®M¨¢¡¯ is numbing and ¡®l¨¤¡¯ is spicy,¡± said Ramakrishnan.

The couple structures the menu to offer different flavour profiles: One meal included a cold wood ear mushroom appetiser with sweet and sour flavours and a chicken with a chilli oil flavour. A tea ceremony from the region precedes the meal. ¡°We have a tea sculpture and a silk-embroidered scroll; we share stories behind them. Chengdu hip-hop plays in the background,¡± he said.

The Brunch Club

¡°Think of it like a house party, only slightly formal,¡± said D¡¯costa. Aiyo Patrao pays tribute to her Goan upbringing as well as her Malyali husband, Ashwin Nair¡¯s roots in Kerala. They started as a delivery kitchen, then a cloud kitchen, and finally a supper club in May of this year. The first edition focused on urrak cocktails, followed by a Malayali pop-up, while the third one focused on Christmas delicacies from the two states.

D¡¯costa and Nair host diners at their Bandra East home in Mumbai, and the menu includes at least one familiar item from Goa and Kerala. ¡°But the main idea is to introduce guests to lesser-known dishes from the two cuisines, like the Goan patoleo or unnakayas from Kerala,¡± she said. D¡¯costa worked as a school counsellor for a decade, while Nair is a chemical engineer. The two have had no professional culinary training but love to cook and entertain.

Beyond The Restaurant Experience

While new cuisines and lesser-known recipes seem to be a common draw for both hosts and diners, for some, like Renjie Wong, it is also a means of expanding their social circle. Wong ran a supper club in San Francisco before moving to Mumbai for work. In San Francisco, he told me, the club was a way for him to hang with people outside his Stanford bubble.

Salon Colaba, which began in August last year, is now 12 editions old. ¡°I grew up in Singapore, and the cuisine there is very diverse. It¡¯s not just Southern Chinese or just Tamil or Malay food, as people believe,¡± he said. Wong combines the flavours and techniques used in Singapore with seasonal produce from the local Colaba market to design a four-course menu. There¡¯s at least one new item on the menu every time. ¡°A dish that often forms the soul of the meal is the thunder tea rice, a Hakka specialty made of rice with a broth on the side,¡± he said. Between work and travel schedules, Wong manages to host two sessions a month.

These supper clubs seem to have appeared seemingly out of thin air, but they are clearly serving a demand to go beyond the restaurant experience. For Prateek Sibal, a Mumbai-based marine lawyer, the interest in supper clubs stemmed from local meals consumed in family homes on trips to Himachal Pradesh and Cambodia. ¡°I think the biggest differentiating factor is the direct interaction with the chef,¡± he said. ¡°A little history behind the recipes and a few anecdotes make it an enjoyable experience. Plus, you get to meet new people and hear about their gastronomic adventures.¡±

Salon Colaba

Other supper clubs eschew the cuisine-centric model. The Brunch Club by Anurag Arora and the Satori Supper Club, both in Bengaluru, are two such examples. Hosted once a month, the first menu of The Brunch Club came with Taiwanese influences and no eggs, which Arora said was his attempt to move away from cliched brunch staples. The menu isn¡¯t repeated, and the designer-turned-chef experiments with different cuisines every time.

The Secret Sauce

Along similar lines, The Satori Supper Club, by Sreya Vittaldev and Shagun Ohri, is all about bringing diners together for a new cuisine each time. Their second and most recent session in August was made up of flavours from Andhra, Telangana, and Hyderabadi cuisine. ¡°These are closely guarded family recipes not served in restaurants,¡± said Vittaldev. For the duo, the supper club was again a means to expand their social circuit. ¡°It¡¯s very hard to meet people outside of your immediate circles in a city like Bengaluru,¡± she said.

The cosiness of a supper club is clearly undeniable, both for the diner and the host. But what happens when a guest doesn¡¯t like the food? Charu Datta, chef and co-founder of Delhi-based Avayava, which focuses on seasonal ingredient-led meals, said that she tries not to take it personally, as food is so subjective. ¡°I try to understand what didn¡¯t work for them and offer a solution,¡± she said. Datta recalled that a recent guest felt that the food lacked chilli, and she accommodated them, even though the flavour wasn¡¯t intended as a part of that dish. ¡°Customers don¡¯t always tell you that they didn¡¯t like the food, but I keep an eye out for the plates that come back from the table!¡±

Mala Kitchen

It is this thoughtfulness and attention to detail, impossible to replicate in a restaurant, that attracts diners looking for something extra. Besides, there¡¯s something secretive and exclusive about the whole affair. There are no walk-ins or a la carte orders; locations and addresses are shared once your spot is confirmed. ¡°Home chefs offer things restaurants don¡¯t,¡± pointed out Vittaldev. ¡°They know that the kind of detail that goes into the food and hosting comes from a place of love.¡±