скачать книгу бесплатно
A question people never ask: Why are you doing this?
Because I love to cook. Because I love to mother. Because I’m a feeder. Because I love to share. Because I like to be in control. Because I enjoy the potential for chaos. Because I’m lonely. Because I like to stir things up. Because I like causing trouble. Because I find it funny and it makes me laugh. Because I want to change things. Because it’s now my job, it’s my living. Because it makes me cook things I wouldn’t be bothered to try for just me and my daughter. Because I don’t have a big family. Because I love community. Because it’s fun to come up with an idea and make it happen. Because, although I love words, I like action even better.
How to Start Your Own Underground Restaurant
If you are a keen cook, a foodie or a traveller, you will probably, at some point, have dreamed about opening your own restaurant or café. People put their life savings into setting up a restaurant, but the reality is that around a third of all restaurants close within the first year. The long hours and small profit margins are tougher than you could ever imagine.
On the other hand, you may never have wanted a professional restaurant but simply adore cooking.
Or perhaps you are sick of inviting people to dinner, always being the host, spending a small fortune and never being invited back?
This chapter is for all of you…
So before you spend your money on buying a lease, hiring staff and equipping a professional kitchen, why not rehearse by starting a supper club? The main qualities you will need are friendliness, trust in others, faith, hospitality and a certain amount of bravery.
First of all, just do it. Go on, play restaurants. Take the plunge. It may even cure you of any urge to open a restaurant. I’m not going to hide the fact that it is a lot of work, you won’t make much money, you may even make a loss, but hell, it’s great fun. And believe me, you will never again go to a conventional restaurant with the same attitude. Suddenly all will become apparent: the mistakes, the cover-ups, the pressure and the sheer bloody slog of making food for large amounts of strangers.
Starting a supper club requires different rules to opening a restaurant. As a new phenomenon, the parameters are changing all the time. I will give you the benefit both of my experience and of the expertise of other underground restaurateurs.
So here is the 12-step programme:
1 LETTING PEOPLE KNOW................
Most guides on how to start your own restaurant focus on things like making sure your restaurant is in a good location and is obvious from the street, with effective ‘signage’. You don’t have that problem. The harder it is to find your supper club, the more obscure the location, the better. You will have no business from the street. Your clientele will come from word of mouth or word of mouse!
First of all, announce it. Tell your friends and family, and their friends and families. But you also want strangers, don’t you? Otherwise it’s just a dinner party with your mates. So you need to know how to pull in strangers. (Sounds like L’Auberge Rouge, a kind of hoteliers’ Sweeney Todd, doesn’t it?)
New media is your friend. Facebook, Twitter, blogging, Craigslist, Gumtree, Ning, these are all great methods for spreading the word. Start a Facebook group, set up a Twitter account, write a blog. By the time this book comes out there is bound to be some new fashionable social-media method, so find out what it is and use it. Age is no barrier to this: most of these media are user-friendly. Lynn Hill, who started the My Secret Tea Room near Leeds, is in her 60s and adept at making connections with new media.
But don’t forget old media: once you’ve found your feet, let your local newspaper know. You could even put ads up in newsagents and shops. (Sheen supper club did this, got a few snooty remarks but soon filled up with locals.) If you have a particular theme – say, organic seasonal food – then put up a little notice in your nearest organic produce shop.
Get cards printed; I get mine from MOO.com via Flickr. Easy-to-design, small and attractive. Personal marketing: every time you go out, take your cards with you, hand them out, explain your new venture. You could also get brochures done. Flypost, as if for a gig. All this is basic marketing and PR. You want to fill your places. Bums on seats.
Choose a name that is emblematic of your living-room restaurant. Most supper clubs use words like hidden, secret, underground or midnight in their name. This gives an indication of the clandestine and guerilla nature of the operation. Sometimes they call it after the location, such as The Shed or Ahoy there! (on a boat), or the menu served, like The Bruncheon club.
Best not to call the press until you’ve set foot in the kitchen. Go for a soft opening and practise your mistakes in private. (As one of the first, I did not have this advantage. The Guardian and several food bloggers insisted on coming for the first night even though I had explained that I probably wasn’t ready. It really added to the pressure. I had not foreseen the level of interest that my home restaurant would trigger.) However, it has not been PR expertise that got me publicity and renown: I’ve been making it all up as I go along, but I was excited about it, and that enthusiasm conveys itself to others…
It’s also a good idea to do some research. Go and visit other supper clubs. Read up on them if you are too far away to visit. Volunteer to help out for a night or two. I get e-mails all the time asking to work. Lady Grey of the Hidden Tea Room in London offered to take me to lunch to pick my brains. Feeding a cook is a perfect method of extracting information. You will soon work out what tricks and techniques you want to retain and which do not suit you. When I started, there were no others to check out. Now there are…so use them!
2 TAKING BOOKINGS................
Once you have people booking, you will need to work out a method for handling their enquiries. Do be courteous and answer all their e-mails within, say, a 24-hour period. If they have paid all or a portion up-front, remember that they don’t know you. If you don’t reply, they will get anxious, especially if you haven’t given them the address yet. I went to a supper club in Brighton that didn’t give me the address until the morning of the dinner. Anything could have happened, my e-mail could have gone down, I could have been staying the night elsewhere.
Another underground restaurateur didn’t give the address, only literary clues. It turned out she had a blue plaque of a well-known poet on the wall of her house. You could do a treasure hunt of clues, but while a little mystery is quite a good thing, don’t go over the top and exhaust your guests before they arrive!
So, bearing in mind that answering all these e-mails takes up a lot of time that you could be spending in the kitchen practising dishes, get yourself a system. Write a stock response, copy and paste it into each email. Have several replies ready:
1) I’m afraid we do not have space for that date blah blah but will put your name on a waiting list.
2) This is where to pay (bank details) or where to book tickets (web address).
3) Here is the address and time to come. How to get there, a map perhaps or transport directions. You may want to give them a phone number. But be wary of this unless you have someone to answer the phone for you. There’s nothing more annoying than last-minute phone calls from people who think nothing of pestering you endlessly with questions and requests for step-by-step directions to your doorstep. I’ve actually lost friends at my own parties by snarling at them when they called wanting to discuss their love lives, what they should wear etc., just as you are trying to organise everything and get your own make-up on.
4) Any house rules or information you might want to give.
5) Menus. I change them every week and post it up on my blog or on my Facebook group. But they are subject to change; the lack of choice is part of the appeal. You will eat what Mummy tells you!
At the beginning I would have, say, a group of four people booking and each of them would e-mail me twice. That’s eight e-mails for one group. Your head starts to explode and it can be a struggle to stay polite. Early on I had one guest who called me when I was in the bath. I tried to sound professional but he could hear the splashing. Eventually I confessed, ‘Well, this is a home restaurant, it’s not every day you get the chef taking reservations from his bath!’
If you have done a few dinners and want to continue, consider signing up with a ticket agency who will take the pressure off you and answer those e-mails. You will still get e-mails...from, say, people informing you of food allergies or birthdays, but not as many.
I forgot to give my address to one couple. My dinners start at 7.30 p.m. I was cooking all afternoon, but at 8 p.m. I just happened to check my e-mails. There were several desperate messages saying, ‘We’ve booked babysitting and we don’t know where you are! Please please call.’ I felt terrible. They did get here in the end and were rightly given a free bottle of wine.
So a website handling all that is rather a good idea. Unless you’ve got a huge amount of elves working for you for free.
3 PAYMENT.........................
Are you going to allow people to pay on the night? In cash? I knocked that idea on the head after the first week.
I had sold 15 places, the last two places booked only that afternoon. I was turning other people away. The last two people did not turn up! They had got drunk and could not be bothered. A supper club has no walk-in traffic. You need everybody to attend and pay. Profit margins, especially at the beginning, are so tight that you will, as I did, make a loss.
I had already spent the money on ingredients and increased the amount that I was cooking. Straight away I realised I needed a system of prepayment, or I would be losing money every week. One week, Horton Jupiter had ten no-shows. You can’t afford that. Nor do you want to live on the same leftovers for the rest of the week.
It’s not only the money: empty tables and spaces look bad, especially if it’s supposed to be a large mixed table and some people haven’t turned up.
Now in the confirmation e-mail I say: ‘Treat this like an invitation to a friend’s dinner party. If you can’t come, at least let the hostess know.’
So my advice is to at least take a deposit, if not to get them to pay the full amount beforehand. You can go two routes with this: they can pay directly into your bank account, in which case you are revealing your name and address. If you do not want to do that, they can pay via Paypal or a ticket seller. I started with Paypal, but I still had to respond to e-mails and their customer service is abroad. Also, let’s face it, it is a multi-national company, and part of the underground-restaurant movement’s ethos is that you are sticking it to The Man. Why sign up with a globalised corporation? It’s everything we are against.
I went with a British ticket seller: wegottickets.com. They charge ten per cent on top, to the customer not to you. There are other ticket sellers too, like brownpaper tickets, but I haven’t tried them.
You have to remember that this is still a new thing for many people. They can be quite nervous about coming and need reassurance. A ticket agency is, hopefully, reputable and gives the added guarantee that should something go wrong, the customers have a third party to complain to, get their money back from.
A good ticket agency will quickly deal with e-mails, bookings, and have English-speaking customer service. The only disadvantage is that, under British law, they will be the ones who have the mailing list, not you, and it’s an opt-in list. You need to build your mailing list for future events, so I suggest that you get a visitors’ book where people can write their comments, e-mail addresses and Twitter IDs. Or come to an arrangement with the ticket seller.
DECIDE YOUR PRICE.........................
Find out what local conventional restaurants are charging. That’s a good guideline.
While many people expect to pay less at a home restaurant – after all, you are not paying business rates and rents – at the same time you are not getting the bulk discounts and trade prices that conventional restaurants benefit from. Also, if they don’t sell a dish one night, they can sometimes sell it the next.
But remember that you are offering a unique experience that restaurants cannot offer. Don’t undersell yourself. It’s a tough balance.
Work out what you are comfortable with and stick to it. The rule is a third of your income should get used for expenditure on ingredients; a third on staff, laundry, equipment, utilities, bills, everything else; and the remaining third is profit. You probably won’t make a profit at first. In your anxiety to please, you may overspend on ingredients, buy new furniture and all sorts of equipment.
Decide on your policy about free places. I don’t give any free places except to my mother. My friends pay. The press pays. I can’t afford to give away free seats. I run a tiny little operation.
You could give discounts to friends if you like, or people could volunteer to work in exchange for dinner. I save places at cheaper rates for the unemployed. I do this for a couple of reasons: I’ve been a single mother for many years, living on very little money. I have a great deal of understanding of what it feels like to be left out of something because you simply can’t afford it. Plus I’m political, idealistic. I want the world to be a better place. That may sound mawkish but it’s true.
4 LOCATION................
As I said before, you have an advantage over a conventional restaurant. It doesn’t really matter where you are located. People are, in effect, ‘invited guests’ and you are not depending on footfall in the vicinity. In some ways, just like at the peak of the rave culture, the more obscure the location, the more exciting it is for the guests.
Are you going to have it in your home or a pop-up location? It’s easier logistically to have it at home, especially if the pop-up location doesn’t have a kitchen. You don’t have to transport all the cooking utensils, plates, silverware and ingredients to the new place.
There are plenty of locations to host pop-up restaurants: ask for the use of a café that is open only at lunchtimes and would be happy to get a little rent for the evenings, or one that is normally closed at weekends. Do a deal with a pub, ask to use their function room while they provide the drink. This would avoid licensing problems. Other ideas for locations: an art gallery, a squat, a loft, a boat, a factory, a garden or allotment if the weather is good.
Personally I prefer it in the home. Part of the excitement is the voyeurism of going into someone’s private space. I love looking at people’s houses.
It’s true however that this takes a certain amount of bravery; where you live, how you live, your cooking, perhaps even your family life, is exposed to public view and possibly public criticism. But, people are aware of that and are always – so far, in any case – very polite. To your face at least. Who knows what they say on the car ride home? But they don’t expect restaurant-level cooking and a spotless, luxury location. The kind of people who book will be adventurous, curious and flexible. They just want something authentic and some proper home cooking.
So, banishing any insecurities, think about your space, where you live, where people are going to eat. Play to its strengths...do you have a big balcony or garden? Have the drinks on the balcony, or use it for barbecue cooking. Is there something quirky or unusual about the design of your place? Do you have a large or particularly nice kitchen? Make sure you invite people to have a look.
Where are people going to eat? The likelihood is that your living room is the largest room. I had to move first one, then the other sofa into my bedroom, then the TV, then everything else. My bedroom, formerly a luxury boudoir, designed to ensnare men, now looks like a junkshop.
The look: part of the charm of a supper club is your personal style...whatever it may be. I lived for six years in Paris and one year in Provence (a cliché, but true) and I’ve been collecting vintage crockery and French kitchenalia for years, so that is part of my style, shabby chic Francophilia.
You may prefer a more modern and clean look. A friend of mine, originally from Zimbabwe, has only wooden crockery and bowls, much of it African. Her flat is like going into a little forest, full of birds’ nests and chunks of tree trunk.
If you haven’t got much money, you might go to Ikea, or your local second-hand and charity shops. Freecycle and eBay are also options for free/cheap furniture and crockery. I’ve been to squats where you drink out of jam jars rather than glasses, it was fun!
It’s about vaunting your style…you may love heavy, hand-made pottery, slate platters, silver cloches or Toby Jugs. Even if you have no style or very bad taste, that too can be part of the experience. If you are in a large city and there are several supper clubs, you will find that people will do the circuit, come around to see you all, and they want each one to be different.
The individuality of the place and the table settings is part of the appeal. The quirkiness, the individuality, the absence of corporate tableware, all this is key to the success of a home restaurant.
There are some supper clubs that imitate restaurants. You book a table for two, you don’t talk to other tables. You have imitation restaurant food. The portions are tiny, nouvelle-cuisine restaurant stylee. You aren’t invited into the kitchen and all signs of slovenly family life have been tucked away. The service is formal, even obsequious. The china matches, and has been bought especially for the occasion.
I don’t get it. This is our chance to muck about with the format. Frankly, if I feel like serving a dozen starters and no pud, or vice versa, well why not? Let’s play. Yes, one has to give some food, there has to be some kind of chef/dinner/guest equation, but let’s push it around a little. ‘Guests’ can help out, come into the kitchen, get their own water. They keep their cutlery between courses, just like in France. ‘Staff’ can sit down and chat. The hierarchy is horizontal. It’s anarchy, but in the true sense of the word: ‘an’ (Greek for ‘without’) ‘archy’ (a ruler). Not chaos.
Remember: you are not a proper restaurant; you don’t have to pretend to be one. At first you will probably try to ape a restaurant – after all, this is the model that we know. But afterwards, as you gain confidence, tear up the rulebook!
Work out how many tables and chairs you have. Borrow from neighbours and relatives. (I went to one supper club that was allowed to borrow neighbour’s chairs only until midnight! Like Cinderella we had to sit on the floor afterwards!) You could also buy some cheap fold-down ones, depending on the look you want. You can always paint them, add nice cushions. Chairs, crockery, glasses and cutlery do not have to match: mismatching is great if everything ‘shouts’ at the same volume.
If you don’t have enough chairs, and the guests live nearby or have a car, let them bring their own. (Two girls once brought their own chairs to my place, then went out partying later, carrying them to a nightclub. They told me it was very handy for sitting down in the club later, not to mention a great conversation starter.) I have also used piano stools, drum stools, boxes, dressing-table stools.
The tables you buy, borrow or retrieve from the garden will guide whether you put your guests on small tables with separate parties or large mixed tables.
As for the bathroom, label it and signpost it so that people know where to go. Make sure it’s clean. Always have enough loo paper. A clean towel to dry their hands is good. After several weeks during which I kept having to buy more ear buds, I realised they were being used by the guests! I think conventional restaurants are missing a trick by not providing them! You could really go to town and provide eau de cologne, hairspray and lipstick as they do in the bathrooms of New York nightclubs.
5 FOOD.........................
Obviously this is the most important element. The menu is at the heart of what you are creating.
WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO COOK?.........................
The first few times, I’d stick to the dishes you are most comfortable with cooking. You will be nervous enough, you don’t want to cock up the cooking! Later on, you can let rip with the molecular experiments!
Leave enough time to prep, and for mistakes. In your anxious state, it’s amazing how dishes you’ve cooked perfectly a hundred times can go wrong. If you do decide to experiment, practise it first. Also remember that a dish that works wonderfully for 2–6 people is very different when you are doing it for double or more than that amount of people.
The secret of good food is: spend less time cooking and more time shopping! Unusual and seasonal ingredients, even just to garnish, can add that extra flair. This is what I do, but how you do it is up to you.
~ Cocktail with olives, pretzels or nuts ~
~ Starter ~
~ Home-made bread ~
~ Main course ~
~ Salad ~
~ Cheeseboard ~
~ Dessert ~
~ Coffee ~
(sometimes fresh mint tea, depending on the meal)
For £40 that’s not bad value. The point is, you can afford the whole experience. In conventional restaurants, a lot of mental arithmetic is involved, trying to figure out if you should share a starter, miss out pudding, have coffee at home. Those little bits really add up and that is how normal restaurants make their money, with the drink, the desserts and the coffees…in short, the extras. It can make dining a frustrating experience. Even when restaurants do fixed menus, frequently there are ‘supplements’ that are added on, generally for the dish you really want.
Other times I have done tapas or meze, up to 12 small courses.
SUPPLIERS AND INGREDIENTS.........................
So you’ve made a shopping list. But how much to buy? Another difficulty. In a conventional restaurant, what you don’t sell one night, you can sell the next. For an occasional supper club you have to get it right. Only experience can tell you that.
And where are you going to buy, say, 30 artichokes for your starters? They cost a fortune in the supermarket. Suppliers are the bane of most restaurants. Reliable suppliers are the most important element of any business. If you do have connections to professional chefs or kitchens, ask them who their suppliers are...and whether they mind adding on an order for you. You will get better deals and normally they deliver to your doorstep. That’s a huge relief when prepping can take up so much time, and you don’t want to be popping out to the shops every 5 minutes.
My local organic vegetable box scheme guy came to a dinner. He loved the concept and will now do me bulk prices. It does take a while to build these relationships but they are invaluable. Repay favours in kind, invite them to a dinner!
I do a mix of shopping between the local organic veg supplier and my local street markets. Going to a street market can be very inspirational when you are feeling a bit flat, a bit ‘What the hell shall I cook this week?’
Use good ingredients. Don’t skimp on quality. If your ingredients are good, you can’t go too far wrong. One supper club I read about didn’t cook anything. They just ordered great cheeses, hams, salamis, bread, salads, chutneys, smoked fish and set it out picnic-style.
If you or your friends have gardens or allotments, ask them to sell you their excess.
I do buy from large multi-national supermarkets sometimes. It’s convenient and they deliver, saving time for you. But I try not to do so. I feel this whole ‘movement’ is about circumventing large-scale corporations.
PLAN YOUR MENU.........................
Decide what kind of food, how many courses. When you know how many people you have coming, multiply whatever recipe you are doing to make that number of servings. Make a little extra. Many home restaurants do serve seconds, just like your mum would. Better to have more than less.
Think about your equipment in the context of your menu. Remember you have only a domestic kitchen. Plan your menu around your oven/cooker/fridge capacity. If you are doing three courses, have your menu balanced around hot and cold dishes. This relieves the pressure on your oven. So think it through. Maybe you want to start with a soup that can be made on the hob, a main that can be baked in the oven and a cold pudding.
A soup can also be prepared in advance and set aside; the salad won’t use up precious oven or hob space. Dessert can also be pre-prepped, made the day before.
Then prep. For your first meals, depending on how many people you have, give yourself two days. Make a ‘countdown’ of timings, what needs to be done first until last, and tick off tasks as you complete them. Obviously prep the stuff that stays less fresh last. Maybe part-cook some dishes and finish them off on the night.
