Barcelona Is “Perfecto”

“Perfecto”

I am now fluent in Catalan. What a fantastic word to describe so many things. The use of one word is so helpful when travelling the world. I went to Paris in high school with my French class and remember having a goal of getting through the day with one word: “Oui”. Again, it is a perfect word.

This story brings back the old joke:

What do you call someone who speaks many languages: Multilingual
What do you call someone who speaks two languages: Bi lingual
What do you call someone who speaks one language: American

The joke is sad, but true. We Americans are spoiled because in so many places around the world we can get by with our one language. On the other hand, I remember telling my friend in Holland how advantaged his children would be as they spoke: Dutch, English, German and French. He told me that he doubted that they were advantaged at all because the Dutch children were forced to spend a disproportionate amount of their intellectual energy on language versus American children being able to have more focus on math and science. Who knows what is true. I do know I love having one word to focus on: “Perfecto”.

Barcelona has been a great place to build on our supper club mission. We started our first night by having dinner with two old supper club friends from Memphis. Linda Stevens and Steve Cooper just happened to be in Barcelona with her sister and brother in law. We had a wonderful dinner at Patron. The waiter took the lead and kept up a flow of Tapas and sea bass prepared a few different ways. “Perfecto”.

(Dick, Karen, Steve, Linda, Susan and Paul at Patron)

We spent a day with a Danny (www.inourbarcelonatour.com) touring the city. The works of Gaudi highlighted by La Sagrada Familia really stood out. Many of us have toured cathedrals, but this place is different. I had been to Barcelona 20 years ago and to see the progress and the beauty was special. The work has progressed enormously. So much so that one feels compelled to come back to see it finished. They say it will be done by 2026 (100^thanniversary of Gaudi’s death), but I suspect that a final completion is a long way off. The place is amazing. It is the only cathedral in the world where you have to pay to get in and people line up by the thousands every day. “Perfecto”.

There are two major supper club food themes that we are bringing back from Barcelona. Tapas and seafood are everywhere you look. The Tapas theme is fantastic for supper clubs as the sharing of food is a great way to socialize over a meal. The seafood of this city on the Mediterranean is spectacular. We had dinner last night at Botafumeiro restaurant and had some amazing seafood. “Perfecto”.

Tapas of grilled pork, sausage and codfish croquet

Razor clams with herb butter

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“Une Femme D’un Certain Age”

You have to love the French. Not only can they really cook, but they have such a wonderful way with words. They would never say:

“He looks good for his age”
“He reminds me of my father” or worse: “My grandfather”.
“He looks so much older than his wife”

Instead they say: “Un home d’un certain age” (A man of a certain age). It sounds so much better. A problem our local supper club has is that a lot of members are of a certain age. Many have been in the club for over 20 years. Lots of our good friends have moved away. We are faced with the challenge of recruiting new members not of a certain age.

The key to the health of most supper clubs is growth. The supper clubs that last for a long time are the ones that are open to new members and actively encourage newbies, especially younger ones, to easily get involved.

Just about everybody likes to socialize over a meal, but many of us are daunted by the supper club challenges of:

Finding the right people?
How to organize?
How to host a dinner party?
What if i don’t cook?
How to recruit new (and younger) members?

Impromptu Friday Nights – A Guide to Supper Clubs (Available from Morgan James Publishing anywhere books are sold) addresses these concerns in detail. However, encouraging and recruiting new members is a key and more than worthy of a few meaningful, or at least humorous, thoughts.

Our neighborhood is in transition. The homes are 20 to 30 years old and many of the original owners have retired and moved away. The bad news is that our supper club membership has fallen off as the core group has aged. The good news is that it is still an attractive neighborhood with affordable homes near good schools and we have seen a significant influx of younger families. It is a perfect environment to attract new members to a supper club.

The key is to get younger people involved. Our club leadership has taken several steps to do so. Historically, the way we have gotten new people involved is as subs who come to a supper club when a regular member can’t. The good news is that subs don’t have to host and quite often didn’t even need to cook. They show up, have a good time and hopefully get more involved. The bad news is that as subs they would get called at the last minute and quite often couldn’t come because of scheduling conflicts. In an effort to get subs and younger people involved, we have started trying to recruit new subs in advance.

Coincidently, a wine club has sprung up in the neighborhood. Many of the participants are younger. The founder of the club developed a website and used it to get the club set up amongst her younger friends. We are trying to get the wine club set involved with the supper club and at the same time adapting some of the more casual features of the wine club into the supper club. For example, historically the supper club has been scheduled for Saturday nights. The wine club meets mostly on Sundays, but moves the dates around and is more flexible trying to get as many people involved as possible.

A classic example of Une femme d’un certain age was the French actress Simone Signoret in her later years (Pictured above). She was a great actress who was also married to the actor Ives Montand. Ives was famous in the U.S. for the movie he made with Marilyn Monroe Let’s Make Love. It just so happens that Ives was a first cousin of my International Sales Manager at Kraft, John Argiro. John told us the story of how Ives had an affair with Marilyn during the filming of movie. As John said: “Who could blame him, he was French”. Simone never divorced him. She just made him pay. The supper club moral of this story is that getting members not of a certain age involved is good. However, discretion is the better part of valor.

Where To Shop?

When planning a supper club dinner party, one of the keys to success is using high quality ingredients. One stop shopping is great for convenience, but it usually doesn’t mean the best quality. Today, depending on where you live, you probably have all kinds of options.

In Europe you have the option of going to your favorite butcher for meats, farmer’s market for vegetables, baker for breads and patisserie for dessert. In most of the United States we are subject to what retail chains are in your area. In Memphis, we used to have one or two super market options led by Kroger. Kroger by default was the leading “one stop shop”, but it was limited in variety and quality.

Today’s market is filled with options. I will got to:

Costco, for meats and wine.
Fresh Market, for bread, smaller quantities of meat, herbs and certain vegetables.
Whole Foods, Sprouts and Trader Joe’s when I am lost
Kroger, for staples and most vegetables
Amazon, for specialty items like Double Zero flour.

The good news is that increased competition has forced all the players in raise their game. Kroger gets extra kudos for improving their offering and technology advancements like Scan and Go where shoppers can scan items as they shop and speed through checkout.

I have a confession to make. My choice of shopping options are tainted by my 35 years in the food business. Costco and Kroger were great customers for us. Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s were not. The joke in the food business was that Whole Foods would be better known as Whole Paycheck. They were very proud of their product. Maybe Amazon will change that. Their niche being natural/less processed products, left a disconnect with Kraft as a major food processor. Whole Foods focused more on smaller manufacturers that made less processed products. The good news is that the smaller manufacturers were in a better position to meet the Whole Foods requirement for less processed. The bad news was that less processed meant greater food safety risks. At one point Whole Foods approached Kraft saying that if we wanted to sell to them, we would have develop a program to train their smaller manufacturers about food safety. That certainly didn’t work and has tainted my opinion. But I digress…

Getting back to the goal of getting the best ingredients for your dinner party. I take the following steps:

Develop a theme (e.g. Italian)
Write a menu
Outline recipes and ingredients
Detail a shopping plan (what, where and when)
Identify timing of when I will prepare/cook
Shop/prep/cook/serve/enjoy

Quite often things will change as you do the shopping. If I see great mushrooms at the farmers market I might change things to accommodate something special. The key is to enjoy the process. Develop a list of your favorite places to find the ingredients you like. When it is time to entertain, you will have fun shopping for those special items that you, and your guests, will enjoy.