Three Keys to Wowing Your Supper Club

There is not much more rewarding than getting rave reviews to a meal that you serve to friends. One key is the fact that people “eat with their eyes”. If a meal looks good, chances are people will say it tastes good. A second key is layering in flavor. Really great dishes are quite often multi dimensional where the chef as added flavors in multiple forms. The third key is the power of suggestion. If an expert tells you that this is going to taste great, chances are you will think it tastes great.

Think of the importance how a plate is presented at a good restaurant. The good chef will go to great pains to make sure that the first impression that people SEE is good. There has been considerable research on the subject that all points to the importance of the fact that “people eat with their eyes”. The key point for the supper club is to go an extra step to make sure the food presentation is good. I am a huge fan of plating dishes versus serving things family style. In plating you get to add a few touches. Arrange the food well. Dress the plate with herbs. Pay attention to how you serve a sauce. It doesn’t take all that much effort but presentation is important.

Great chefs will layer in flavor. They season a dish multiple times. One great chef told me that at culinary school she was taught that if you don’t get at least one complaint a night about too much salt you are not adding enough. The proteins are quite often marinated or brined. At Kraft Food Ingredients we had a line of flavors called the “The flavors of cooking”. (Grill, Roast, Sauté etc.). We had marketing tag line that said: “Nothing influences the flavor of food more than how it is cooked. Think about it. A good chef will go to great lengths to sear, grill, sauté, roast, braise etc. What they are doing is layering in flavor.

If you want people to like a dish, have an expert, or someone people think knows something, whisper in their ears “Oh you are really going to love the rack of lamb”. In my last blog I talked about flavor panels. When working at Kraft I worked with one of the world’s greatest cheese experts. Larry Woodford developed the cheese sauce that was used in Kraft’s Mac and Cheese for over 30 years. I used to tell my kids that I worked with the guy that invented Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. To which they would say wow he must be rich. To which I would say no he is just fat. Kraft made all the money. However, Larry had forgotten more about cheese than I would ever know. One thing about Larry, whenever we would have a blind taste test, he was notorious for going around beforehand and whispering to folks “you are going to love sample B”. Invariably sample B would win out. We all figured if Larry who invented cheese likes something, it must be good..

And when all else fails remember the old quote from the great American philosopher Billy Crystal on Saturday Night Live: “It is better to look good than to feel good. You look marvelous darling”.

Be on the look out for “Impromptu Friday Nights – A Guide to Supper Clubs” due out from Morgan James Publishing January 30, 2018

Food Snobs at Supper Clubs

Don’t you just hate it when people who don’t know what they are talking about make statements like they are THE expert? We all know this type of person. I once bought wine for a large gathering that my “expert” criticized as being “pedestrian”. Any authority she had on wine had been thrown out the window years ago when she put ice cubes in a 10 year old Napa Cabernet that I had saved for a special occasion. In her defense, she likes ice in her wine, but a wine expert, she is NOT.

The truth is most people don’t have discerning palettes. I have been trained twice as a flavor panelist. The reason I was trained twice is that I am not very good. Working for Kraft I have been part of thousands of flavor panels. A great example of the average palette not being all that good is a study Kraft did on Jell-O gelatin. If you took the color out of the different flavors of Jell-O the average person could only pick 2 of the 10 flavors correctly.

When I worked in the chocolate business we were always panel testing our chocolate. Quite often the tests came back inconclusive. Well old Joe was THE expert and the loudest and he usually drove results via the volume of his voice. Then we had some training on flavor tasting with a test at the end. Turns out old Joe didn’t know squat. To make matters worse (for chauvinistic Joe) his secretary Sharon turned out to have the most discerning palette. It drove the flavor snob nuts when decisions were being made on Sharon’s expertise.

I was once in a supper club and a food snob asked if the cook had used Hellman’s Mayonnaise in the tuna salad because she wouldn’t eat it unless it was made with Hellmann’s. When you are using mayonnaise in a complex system like tuna salad (tuna, mayo, onion, celery, mustard, relish) there in no way you could tell the difference between brands of mayonnaise in a blind panel test. The standard practice is taste three samples one being different and two being the same control with no labeling or visual difference. Trust me that the food snob could never pick a different mayo in the tuna salad in a statistically valid test. There is one difference you could tell and that is the difference between Miracle Whip and mayonnaise. In my family I grew up calling Miracle Whip mayonnaise, but mayonnaise it is not.

Another one of my pet peeves are the wine ratings advertised. The top wine ratings are not done on a blind basis. The raters are selling advertising space in their magazines. IF you think that they are not being influenced by the label on the bottle and advertising dollars the vintner spends, you are kidding yourself. The truth is that the average consumer reads the wine list from right to left. That is, they look at the price first and assume the more expensive a wine is, the better it is. As we all know this doesn’t always work, but at least the food snob thinks it does.

Supper Clubs – How to Handle Costs

How costs are handled is an important element to successful clubs. The reality is that Supper Clubs are generally a low cost way to socialize over a meal. The key is understanding and communication.

The way our neighborhood club handles costs is simple an efficient. And while there are many ways to handle costs this formula just works well. Costs for making the dishes are tracked by each couple. At the end of the evening, all costs for food and wine will be totaled then divided equally among the four couples, with each couple paying one-fourth of the total meal cost.

Cost Example

It is amazing how costs are virtually never an issue. With a little planning and discretion, supper clubs are economical even for the more cost conscious. You can have a good meal and social event for less than $70 per couple. The cost driver is usually the alcohol. The rule we have followed is to target “reasonably” priced wines. Although participants have defined “reasonable” differently, on average we have probably been in the $20-a-bottle range, though there have been notable exceptions for costs and quantities. I can tell you that our young kids did once question the number of wine bottles in the recycling bin after one particularly fun event.

With new people coming in and out of the club, there have been a few surprises. One new club member built in the cost of a pot she bought for the event into her total contribution. I can’t say that couple is still part of the club. The rule we have lived by is that if we incur a cost because we want to try something different or more expensive than the norm, we simply absorb that cost. With this said, some hosts are more popular than others.