Do You Feel Like You Are “Surrounded By Assassins?”

When you are writing a supper club menu or cooking a dinner party meal you can feel like you are “Surrounded by Assassins”. Everyone can be a critic. In today’s world it seems it is easier to complain versus complement. My experience with supper clubs is just the opposite.

When you are hosting people to enable socializing over a meal, people are generally very appreciative. Supper clubbers are just glad to be there. If they don’t like a menu or the meal you might not hear about it. People that have been invited to a dinner party tend to be nice.

It is sort of like the scene from the movie “Notting Hill” where Julia Roberts who is a vegetarian is asked by the cook how she liked the Guinea Fowl? Her response was: “It is the best guinea fowl I have ever eaten”. The cook was complemented. As Julia Roberts is leaving the cook’s wife tells Julia that: “I’ll wait till after you leave before I tell him you are a vegetarian”.

It is pretty much the same at supper clubs. People are filled with complements at the party. As they walk to their cars or when you next see someone in the neighborhood you might hear a bit of negativity.

The most common downfalls involve over cooking. My blog about cooking the perfect steak should alleviate that risk for my blog readers. I have been the target of criticism that menus I have written are too difficult. There is another blog about that one.

The beauty of supper clubs is that with several items on the menu and several cooks involved in the preparation the chances are pretty good that you won’t go home hungry.

If all else fails there is pretty much always alcohol involved, My father used to always comment about his challenged carpentry skills that: “Paint covers a lot of sins”. Having a decent bottle of wine will usually keep the assassins happy.

If you enjoy this blog and similar other stories/supper club lessons subscribe to get future blogs at www.impromptufridaynights.com/blog and be on the look out for my book Impromptu Friday Nights a Guide to Supper Clubs due out from Morgan James Publishing on January 30, 2018.

Cell Phones At The Dinner Table

One of my pet peeves is people using cell phones to make calls in the middle of a dinner party. I have to state up front that I like many of us am addicted to my cell phone. While I am not the nerdiest of nerds, in my circle of baby boomer friends, I am definitely up there as far as being addicted to technology. If you really want to be bored, I can take you through the app I have developed to calculate golf bets. With this said, I also believe you have to draw the line.

There have been times where a guest has made a call from the table at a supper club dinner. It is one thing to get a call, but a completely different thing to make a call. One guy made multiple calls to his daughter while she was on a date. I guess he wanted us to know that his daughter was dating the starring baseball player from the local high school. (Ten years later, the pitcher has signed a $127 million dollar contract. He didn’t marry the daughter.)

For the next supper club, I wrote a menu and put a notice stating, “Please refrain from making cell phone calls from the dinner table” on it. I am not quite sure if it was because of the notice, but the offender dropped out of the club. Virtually the same scenario has happened more than once over the last 15 years.

The rules on the use of cell phones at the dinner table are changing. My wife simply hates it. I find myself using it occasionally. Many millennials have phones as extended appendages. The key with a supper club is to establish ground rules that members can agree on or at least respect.

How To Avoid “One Course Too Many”

One of the dilemmas in writing a menu for a Supper Club is matching the culinary standards of the dinners with the cooking skills of the of the cooks. In today’s worlds of fine dining and the food network the average Supper Clubber has pretty high standards. Quite often, the skills of the cooks don’t match up.

My Culinary guru is Lucien Vendome. He went to Culinary school in Paris. Lucien worked in some of the finest restaurants in the US. He has led Culinary innovation teams for both Nestle and Kraft. Simple put, he is a culinary great, and my good friend. I love the guy, but he is always trying to outdo himself.

Lucien’s assistant for many years was Amanda Hassner who is a phenomenal chef in her own right. She once told me that Lucien’s biography (which she would have to write) would be titled “One Course Too Many”. He never does anything simple. He always does fantastic.

When I write a menu I usually exhibit my inner Lucien. I once wrote a “Piatinni” (small plates) or Tasting Menu that involved 17 pages of instruction. In my mind it was simple. For the other Supper Clubbers it was more challenge than they signed up for. One poor lady was simply overwhelmed. I helped her out by breaking it down, doing some prep work myself and delegating many of the items to other Supper Clubbers.

There are things that are simple to me like chopping onions that were a challenge to my friend. She told me she spent close to an hour chopping onion and garlic. I asked if she owned a food processor? What she did in an hour I would do in five minutes.

Since my 17 page “War and Peace” menu I always try to balance my culinary challenge with the cooking skills. Simple menus can be written that meet the culinary standards of most Supper Clubbers. Some Supper Club cooks are very good and you can get more adventurous. In the long run…simple is better.