Photos by Michael Piazza

Some of the hottest places to dine around Boston these days aren’t inside a full-time restaurant. Instead, they are part of a burgeoning local supper club movement, with private chefs or restaurants-within-restaurants, pop-up style.

It’s a sweltering night in July and Rachel Amiralian, dressed in a formal pink gown, greets guests with Champagne and a smile while dance music pulses through what’s normally the Concord restaurant 80 Thoreau. About three Monday nights each month, the space belongs to Bon Ami: a by-invitation pop-up restaurant Amiralian runs with her husband, Gavin Lambert.

How did the couple arrive at opening a supper club? Amiralian and Lambert met when both worked at 80 Thoreau several years ago. They went on to try their hands at a meal delivery service and frozen food business (Bon Fat), but Amiralian said neither of these was bringing joy or “lighting us on fire.”

They considered opening a restaurant but, after a deal for a space fell through, the couple instead went the supper club route.

“I always talk about how the universe kind of just pushed us in this direction,” Amiralian says. “Now that we’re here, it’s kind of like, have we not been here forever? This is exactly what we’re meant to be doing. It’s setting our souls on fire the way we wanted.”

On this July evening, Lambert is occasionally looking up from food prep in the open kitchen to explain the cadence of the meal. First is a grass-fed beef tartare served with yuzu and parmesan over a tostada. You could call this dish a family affair: Their young daughter helped pick the blueberries used in the salted compound butter for the bread accompanying this amuse-bouche.

Guests this evening will be served five courses that include a trio of oysters, confit pork belly, striped bass, seared duck breast and a local berry tart with pickled rhubarb, hibiscus gel, mango and coconut foam. Along with the welcome Champagne, guests can order wines by the glass or choose an add-on four-course beverage pairing. Later in the meal, Lambert and Amiralian make their way through the dining room passing out shots of mango passion fruit daiquiris, or DTO: “Daiquiri Timeout,” meant as an act of camaraderie with guests, which can also serve as a reset if things go awry in the kitchen.

But based on the friendly banter from the kitchen throughout the meal and smiles from happy diners, it seems like this evening’s DTO is mostly about building kinship and community with guests.

Building community is a theme that extends throughout this rise of modern supper clubs across Greater Boston.

“I’ve been cooped up in a kitchen my whole career, not really interested or engaging with guests,” says Emily Vena, a chef and co-founder of Cobble in Brookline. “This really is marrying the back room and the front of the house because I’m both cooking and serving people. To be that close to people eating the food [I cook] has really been beneficial for me as a chef.”

It’s also beneficial for solo guests who arrive at community dinners on their own.

The Summer Solstice dinner at Uncommon Feasts Wine Bar in Lynn falls on a night where perhaps this reporter isn’t feeling his most social—despite being eager to test out founder Michelle Mulford’s decadent multi-course dinner.

It’s the kind of evening where scrolling through a cell phone and answering emails is preferred over making small talk. Of course, there’s also the joy of sipping a Negroni and tasting Mulford’s delicious squash blossoms filled with homemade sheep-milk cheese, followed by yakitori grilled sardines with salsa verde, crispy pork belly and homemade ice cream sandwiches.

Despite coming alone, I walk away well-fed and having made two new friends who happened to sit by me at a communal table. Chatter of work gives way to travel tales and other fast bonding—and a much happier mood than the one I arrived in.

Mulford runs both the wine bar and the catering arm of Uncommon Feasts. The pop-up dinners happen roughly every five to six weeks, or whenever her catering schedule allows.

“People really like the communal dining experience,” she says. “Doing these dinners is a creative expression that I just don’t get to have with my two full-time businesses. Basically, this is just something that’s fun.”

That sense of community extends across town at Lucille Wine Shop, also in Lynn, where owner Sarah Marshall’s monthly supper club grew out of partnerships with chef friends offering wine pairings with meals during the pandemic. What started as a way to make some extra money for those struggling in the restaurant business has turned into an in-demand monthly event.

“The point is really the overall experience,” Marshall says. “We’ve had many people meet their seat neighbors, and then they’re, like, ‘We’re having a barbecue. We’re going to have you over,’ which is so beautiful.”

Generally, the experience across these various supper clubs entails five courses and a wine pairing. Lucille Wine Shop’s supper club bundles its five-course tasting menu with five wines and brings in a wide range of chefs, including Jiho Kim, formerly the executive pastry chef of the two-Michelin-starred restaurant The Modern in New York City.

Cobble operates a little differently from the other supper clubs—an “un-restaurant” is how Cobble’s co-founder Rachel Trudel describes her and Vena’s concept—in that it has a fixed space in Brookline’s Coolidge Corner Arcade building with service three nights a week. You’ll have to BYOB if you want beer, wine or a cocktail to go with your five themed courses.

Corn was the theme on one of Cobble’s summer menus, including a “welcome course” of corn chowder dip followed by a sweet corn vinaigrette dressing on a salad of shaved cabbage, pickled watermelon rind, cherry tomatoes, white beans and feta. “Corny” San Marzano sauce topped the chicken parmesan while corn custard played a role in the plum tiramisu dessert.

“We were talking about how we could open up a restaurant without opening a restaurant, and dinner parties are something that Emily loves to do, so we thought why not just do the thing you love doing every single night?” Trudel says.

Pursuing a supper club allows chefs to provide innovative cuisine to guests at a fraction of the investment required to run a full restaurant. Rather than building out a permanent dining room and commercial kitchen and obtaining the licenses that accompany such operations, supper clubs can use existing restaurant kitchens or make food from a commissary kitchen off-site and bring it into an existing space, much like a catering job.

“Underground supper clubs in New York came to be from people in the industry wanting to come together, test out their own stuff and do some wine pairings beyond the confines of typical restaurant spaces,” says Marshall, whose supper club chefs cook their dishes remotely but plate and serve on site at the wine shop. “To me, that aspect is really important to maintain the vision.”

But just because there might be lower overhead than a restaurant doesn’t mean it’s exactly an easy proposition. “No matter what, it’s a lot of work to source food and cook it and serve it and clean up afterwards,” says Trudel. “But there are definitely advantages in knowing exactly how many people you’re going to feed ahead of time. That we’re reservation-only is really awesome, both from a food waste perspective and also just for the quality.”

“None of us would be doing this if we didn’t love it,” Marshall adds. “It’s the food and wine industry. It’s not about money. It’s about love, passion and connection.”

It might come as a surprise that these supper clubs aren’t viewed by their owners as a testing ground for an eventual restaurant concept.

Mike O’Connell’s take on a supper club is a little more “side hustle” than the others in this story. O’Connell, along with family members, runs a variety of liquor stores—Upper Falls Liquors, Needham Wine & Spirits, Auburndale Wine & Spirits and Post Road Liquors in Wayland—as well as the Cask Force bourbon and maple syrup line.

But O’Connell is also a private chef (under the Instagram handle @rooftopgourmet) and brings the supper club concept to people’s homes in a form of elevated catering, collaborating with other local food folks and using as many regionally sourced ingredients as possible.

“With my full-time job, I’m running the family liquor stores. I do all the wine buying, but I’ve always loved to cook and have always been fascinated with learning more about cooking, techniques and ingredients,” O’Connell says. “Then when the pandemic hit, people were clamoring for anything new and different.”

He first started with at-home meal kits people could purchase and finish preparing in their own kitchens. Following initial success and a surge in orders, O’Connell ventured into a more supper-club-style catering experience. What’s on the menu? One recent dinner featured pan-roasted Denver steak with grilled tomatillo salsa, fried okra and a fried egg; or harissa- and anchovy-rubbed leg of lamb with couscous, fried mushrooms and pomegranate gremolata.

Many of O’Connell’s dinners include the kind of partnerships you’d find at any of the supper clubs and pop-up dinners found in more commercial settings. Wasik’s Cheese Shop and Captain Marden’s in Wellesley are two of the purveyors he buys from, bringing specialty seafood and artisan cheeses to the party.

He’s also considering hosting suppers at his home following a renovation, currently underway. But don’t look at this as a stepping stone to opening a full-fledged restaurant. That would be more monotonous than what O’Connell gets to do with Rooftop Gourmet.

“This is just more of a creative outlet where I can design the menu and do dishes that I’ve never made before and put my own spin on everything,” he adds.

That mentality is shared at Lucille Wine Shop. While Sarah Marshall’s career found her working at some of Boston’s best restaurants over the years—from Oleana to L’Espalier to Barbara Lynch’s restaurants—that doesn’t mean her supper club is an incubator for getting back into that line of work.

“I do love restaurants. I loved working there; I stayed for 15 years,” she says. “But I got tired and burnt out in some ways. This scratches that itch. We get to play restaurant for a night, and it’s the best.”

“…and then they’re out by 9:30,” adds Daniel Motsinger—Lucille’s manager and sommelier—with a wry grin and a laugh.

dinebonami.com
dinneratcobble.com
lucillewineshop.com
@rooftopgourmet
uncommonfeasts.com

This story appeared in the Fall 2023 issue.

EDITOR’S NOTE: After this issue went to press, Cobble made the following announcement; we wish them well!

To Cobble guests, new and old—

Cobble will be taking a gap year in 2024, and we will use this time to explore new opportunities for Cobble and the future of what it means to dine out. The past three years have been so incredibly rewarding, and we are overjoyed with the positive response to our unique dining concept. We hope to see you before the year is out. If not, we will see you downstairs at Barlette.

Reservations for December will open on October 1st at 9 am via Resy, and our last foreseeable dinner will be on December 31st. We hope to celebrate with you!

Lots of love,
Emily & Rachel (and great grandma Berg)