Moveable feasts: Monthly supper clubs run by young chefs are feeding the borough

By Hannah Berman

What better way to make friends than over food?

This is the rationale, anyway, behind the new era of the supper club in Brooklyn. Since pandemic restrictions eased, small monthly supper clubs geared towards creating community have started popping up all over the city.

These supper clubs are, for the most part, run by young professionals with full-time jobs. For many of the founders, the idea started with a challenge to cook for as many people as they could fit into their own apartments and an Instagram account to instill FOMO. Now, they’ve moved their dinners to roving pop-up locations and made them open to the public — and their events tend to sell out within hours.

The best new supper clubs are, of course, in Brooklyn. Here’s a closer look at four with distinct, unique visions for communal dining that facilitates friendship.

Heirloom Supper Club
At each edition of Heirloom Supper Club, you can find vines of ripe tomatoes strewn around the centerpiece of the table for snacking.

The tomato-based name itself came to Madison Scott, 22, in the middle of a yoga class. Calling the project an “heirloom” struck her as a perfect way to gesture toward the family-oriented spirit of the club envisioned by her and co-founder, Julian Tineo, 24.

“The act of sharing food with friends and family around a table is a really important part of my upbringing,” Scott says. “When Julian and I started hosting dinners for friends together, I was like, oh, this is the next phase of hosting big meals for a bunch of friends, for family.”

Scott, center, and Tineo, right (Photo by Hannah Berman)

Tineo eased into Heirloom Supper Club by first experimenting with cooking vegan food for large groups of his friends. “It’s just been a very natural scaling of me enjoying cooking for people,” he says.

The two first met working at Tineo’s parents’ Bushwick bar, The Sampler. Now, Tineo works in fin-tech, and Scott is a full-time student and works in fashion. They’re busy people, but they still host monthly multiple-course dinners at pop-up venues (most recently at Farm to People), capping tickets at around $65.

“I really think that you should be able to have a great night out in New York for 50 or 60 bucks,” Tineo says. “You know, great wine, great food. It seems like it’s getting harder and harder to do that. To get really creative, elevated dishes, you have to go to restaurants where that price range is almost incompatible. … We take the pricing of our events really seriously for that reason.”

Little Poutine
Supper club Little Poutine is named for the Canadian delicacy of fries smothered in gravy and cheese curds — but that’s not what they usually serve.

“Poutine translates to ‘mess’ in Quebecois,” says Sebastian Elie-York, 26. “And these [dinners] are always a little messy.”

‘Always a little messy’: Elie-York (Photo by Hannah Berman)

By day, Elie-York is a consultant at CitiBank; by night, he works with a collective of around 20 friends, including his hospitality partner Eron Lutterman, to put on monthly fine-dining pop-ups featuring food by talented, overlooked chefs.

Elie-York first started hosting large, cheap dinners for friends in college. After graduating, he worked as a chef at DC’s Michelin-starred restaurant the Dabney.

Instead of featuring his own menu each month — or, for that matter, just a bunch of poutine — Elie-York aims to collaborate with chefs who don’t usually have the opportunity to experiment outside the kitchen. For past dinners hosted at apartments in Bed Stuy and Williamsburg, the Little Poutine team has flown out chefs from celebrated Michelin-starred restaurants all over the world.

“It’s a group of friends, cooking for friends, trying to create a platform for things that aren’t necessarily used to their fullest value typically,” says Elie-York. “A lot of chefs are super knowledgeable, super talented. Rarely are they getting the ability to write their own menus, work with their own teams, or have their concept.”

that dinner thing
Tickets to that dinner thing, a highly curated and picture-perfect monthly dinner series, are particularly difficult to get your hands on right now.

Sierra Lai, 27, founded the supper club with friends Claire Chatinover (29) and Ryn Adkins (31) after the success of a string of monthly dinner parties thrown by Chatinover.

“I started attending every month, and those 20 or 25 people became my first community in New York,” Lai says. “And it was so fascinating because I was only seeing these people every four weeks. But in New York, every four weeks is plenty.”

From left: Adkins, Chatinover and Lai (Photo by Hannah Berman)

All dinners are themed around a word — past selections have included “sonder,” “expansion,” and “duality” — and when participants assemble at a dinner, everyone is invited to make a public toast about the theme at some point in the evening.

“I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea to stand up and talk to a bunch of people,” says Lai. “But we find that grounding it in one question and inviting people to speak to everyone helps build community and makes it feel like a really safe space.”

That dinner thing has become very popular; now, almost two years into operations, tickets to these exclusive, intimate dinners at venues ranging from cafes to brownstones are sold via a lottery-based system.

“We modeled it after sneaker drops,” Lai says. “The lottery allows us to get all of those funds up front so that we’re able to do the test dinners in a sustainable way. It also felt like an accessibility thing for us…. It felt like a more equitable and fairer way to get people access to dinner. Especially when we were seeing demand exceed the number of tickets we had in a night.”

Stay for Supper
Run by Lottie Gurvis, 29, who identifies herself as “just a chef playing friendship cupid,” Stay for Supper sets itself apart by not taking itself too seriously.

“I noticed that, coming out of Covid, there were a lot of new people in the city who were really looking for a sense of community,” Gurvis says. “I’ve been in New York going on 10 years, so I feel really lucky to have my community, and I was in a place to foster that for other people.”

Gurvis of Stay for Supper (Photo by Hannah Berman)

At her events, many of which are hosted at Heaven on Earth in Greenpoint, Gurvis is very intentional about making introductions. She likes to hold a “welcome ceremony” where attendees introduce themselves to the group and respond to a low-stakes icebreaker.

“I’ll also make Mad Libs for people to fill in and then we’ll read them out loud, and everyone’s just dying laughing at an event,” she says.

Humor is a big part of Gurvis’s operation. Her events are given names like “Seasonal Depression Soiree” and “Puddin’ on the Ritz,” a recent pudding party.

“Now I’m getting a ton of returning people — people will beeline to each other and be like, ‘Oh my God, you’re here, we met at the last one,’” Gurvis says. “That’s the best part of it, that these friendships are happening because I try to make the space really welcoming, really comfortable.”