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Stargazy Pie (#litres_trial_promo)
Meat Main Courses (#litres_trial_promo)
Spiced Slow-roasted Leg of Lamb with Mujadara (From The Shed) (#litres_trial_promo)
Mujadara (#litres_trial_promo)
Casa Saltshaker Locro (From Casa Saltshaker, Buenos Aires) (#litres_trial_promo)
Quintessential Chicken (From Ben Greeno) (#litres_trial_promo)
Shin of Beef Ragù (From Sheen Suppers) (#litres_trial_promo)
Pork Belly with Sage and Fennel Stuffing (From Plum Kitchen, New Zealand) (#litres_trial_promo)
Rambling Sunday Roast of Pork Belly with Black Pudding, Thyme and Honey Parsnips and Cider Gravy (From the Rambling Restaurant) (#litres_trial_promo)
Duck Breast with Rhubarb Compote (From Lex Eats) (#litres_trial_promo)
Slow-cooked Sirloin Steak with Wholegrain Nut Crust, Roasted Baby Beets and Baby Spinach Catalan, Served with Truffle Potato Purée (From The Loft) (#litres_trial_promo)
Desserts (#litres_trial_promo)
Mousse au Chocolat Orange with Cointreau and Choc-dipped Physalis (#litres_trial_promo)
Tarte Tatin with Crème Fraîche Ice Cream (#litres_trial_promo)
Crème Fraîche Ice Cream (#litres_trial_promo)
Bergamot Posset with Crystallised Thyme & Lavender Shortbread (#litres_trial_promo)
Saffron Kulfi with Almond & Cardamom Tuile Biscuits (#litres_trial_promo)
Giant Pavlova (#litres_trial_promo)
Salted Caramel (#litres_trial_promo)
Clafoutis (#litres_trial_promo)
Easy Apple Strudel (#litres_trial_promo)
Chav’s White Chocolate Trifle with Malibu (#litres_trial_promo)
Candied Oranges, Lemons & Limes (#litres_trial_promo)
Cheese Course (#litres_trial_promo)
Rye Crispbread (#litres_trial_promo)
Fig Compote (#litres_trial_promo)
Themed Menus (#litres_trial_promo)
Elvis Night (#litres_trial_promo)
Deep-fried Peanut Butter Sandwiches (#litres_trial_promo)
Deep-fried Dill Pickles (#litres_trial_promo)
Shuna’s Cornbread (#litres_trial_promo)
Candied Yams (#litres_trial_promo)
Corn-on-the-Cob (#litres_trial_promo)
Cheese ‘n‘ Grits (#litres_trial_promo)
Collard Greens (#litres_trial_promo)
Blackened Catfish (#litres_trial_promo)
Two Types of Fries (#litres_trial_promo)
Brokeback Baked Beans (#litres_trial_promo)
7UP Salad (#litres_trial_promo)
Pecan Pie (#litres_trial_promo)
Midnight Feast: The Black Album (#litres_trial_promo)
Black Russian Cocktail (#litres_trial_promo)
Black Olive Tapenade (#litres_trial_promo)
Black Cod’s Roe on Black Bread (#litres_trial_promo)
Black Sesame Salmon Balls with an Avocado Oil and Black Vinegar Dipping Sauce (#litres_trial_promo)
Nori Handrolls Stuffed with Black Rice, Black Kale, Black Carrot and Aubergine (#litres_trial_promo)
Beluga Lentils with Goat’s Cheese (#litres_trial_promo)
Squid-ink Tortelloni Stuffed with Goat’s Cheese & Lemon Zest with a Death Trumpet Mushroom Cream Sauce (#litres_trial_promo)
Marmite Chocolate Cupcakes (#litres_trial_promo)
Flower Menu (#litres_trial_promo)
Cava with Sweet Yellow Rocket Flowers or Hibiscus Flowers (#litres_trial_promo)
Courgette Flowers Stuffed with Goat’s Cheese (#litres_trial_promo)
Elderflower Champagne (#litres_trial_promo)
Ginger Beer (#litres_trial_promo)
Elderflower Fritters (#litres_trial_promo)
Marigold Bread (#litres_trial_promo)
Nasturtium Leaf Salad with Marigold petals & plum tomatoes (#litres_trial_promo)
Asparagus Mimosa (#litres_trial_promo)
Mint & White Chocolate Ice Cream (#litres_trial_promo)
Flower Ice Bowl (#litres_trial_promo)
How to Crystallise Herbs & Flowers (#litres_trial_promo)
Mint Tea with Pine Nuts (#litres_trial_promo)
Supper Club Directory
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Picture Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
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 (#ulink_8c6112dc-f64e-55cb-88e9-420cdc495a2a).
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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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…
