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.

Supper Clubs – Finding the Right People

Finding the Right People

Getting people who mesh well together is always a challenge. One benefit of supper clubs is coming across all kinds of people. The good news is that you get to meet people. The bad news is that the chances of them being a great fit are pretty slim. One of the beauties of my supper club experience is that my wife and I have used the more formal supper club, where there are a lot of people, to find the smaller group that we really wanted to be friends with. In the end, dealing with a few jerks can be worth it if you get to know some very interesting people.

The solutions on how to find people to participate in a Supper Club are broad ranging:

Neighborhood groups
- One of the easiest ways to find people and conveniently located.
- The Classic Supper Club model is based on our neighborhood. We have a neighborhood association that publishes a newsletter. There is a section that advertises participation in the supper club. I have actually heard of people that bought a house in our neighborhood because they knew about the supper club.
Internet groups
- One site you could use to get started getting together with people over food is grubwithus.com. People get connected through the site, usually at a local restaurant.
Colleagues
- We all spend quite a bit of time with the people we work with. The subject of socializing over a meal is very easy to interject. When I lived in Delaware, I traveled with a guy I worked with. We would dine together on a Wednesday night and the subject of my supper club would come up. It didn’t take long for him to want to be part of the Saturday night supper club, where I would try to replicate the dishes we shared at a restaurant the previous Wednesday.
Church groups
School groups
Facebook friends

The supper clubs I have been involved with have led to real friendships. We have formed clubs from the wide array of sources listed above and have learned there is no one right way to find the right people. Trial and error is the only way. Going through a few bad experiences makes you appreciate the good ones.

Finding the right people has some real benefits. While most of us know a thing or two about wine, it is great to have a wine and beer experts in the group.

My friend, Scott, is the perfect example. He is excellent at paring the right wine with the menu. Scott, like many wine “experts,” has an excellent wine collection and is great at offering up a few (or 10) delicious bottles from his cellar. Scott was such a good customer of the local wine store affectionately named “Germantown Baptist Wine and Liquor” by Scott’s wife Kathy that when he moved, the wine store flew their flag at half-mast for weeks.

In my neighborhood, we are also blessed to have a “beer guy” as well. Tom Schoelkopf worked for Anheuser Busch and is a great guy to have at a party. You can count on him to bring a good selection of Budweiser’s classic product as well as some newer products they are developing. For many of our supper club events, people are asked to bring an appetizer. Tom is famous for asking, “Do you want me to cook or should I just bring beer?” Somehow, the answers are pretty consistent

It can be difficult to find the right people for a supper club. A good thing about being part of a larger group is that you get to meet a lot of people. Some you like and some, not so much.