Fringe benefits

The roving supper combines eating out with eating in

By Twilight Greenaway

June 25, 2007

The small apartment flickers with candlelight. Chairs cluster around the table in the dining room, while two long, low tables crowd the living room. At 6:30 p.m., guests begin to arrive, carrying bottles of wine and their own floor cushions. After a few minutes of mingling and introductions, each claims a place to sit and the evening begins.

Serving on stilts at a Ghetto Gourmet dinner.

This Saturday-night event, held in Oakland, California, might be just another dinner party, with a bohemian, homey feel. But the meal — staged by the Ghetto Gourmet, a self-styled “wandering supperclub” — includes 30 diners, two cooks, five volunteer servers and a mid-course comedian, all crammed into a single apartment. And the four-course menu features sweet-potato tortellini, seared ahi tuna, shrimp consommé with homemade seafood sausage, and braised grass-fed beef short ribs.

Only a handful of the guests here tonight actually know the woman in whose home they’re dining. Most are here — in one way or another — because of the Internet.

The Ghetto Gourmet crew hosts regular, rotating events that pair enterprising chefs with urban foodies inside unconventional dining venues, such as living rooms, galleries and warehouses. They do several dinners a month in the Bay Area and in the last year have branched out into serving meals in a number of additional cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Miami. They call what they do “pirate dining,” and their logo features a twist on the Jolly Roger: a skull sporting a toque crossed with a spoon and fork instead of bones.

Jeremy Townsend, one of the founders of the Ghetto Gourmet, avoids the term “underground restaurant,” but that’s what many of tonight’s participants will call it on Monday, when they report back to friends and coworkers on what they did over the weekend.

Nearly four years ago, Townsend began hosting small dinners in order to create a venue for his brother, then a budding Bay Area chef. They charged only $20 a plate and served 12 people at a time (mostly friends and mutual acquaintances) in their basement apartment.

Within the first few months, Townsend started using the popular online community Craigslist to promote the dinners. Soon he set up an account on Tribe.net, a similar community-oriented website, and got mentioned on Flavorpill, a popular online events list.

A Ghetto Gourmet dinner held in an art gallery.

Bloggers began to check out the Townsend brothers’ activities, and eventually the San Francisco Chronicle wrote them up in January of 2006 as a “culinary speakeasy.” All along, those in the know had been visiting the Ghetto Gourmet website to sign up for the email newsletter that keeps members abreast of upcoming meals.

What began as a fun, casual project had morphed, unintentionally, into a thriving business. The Ghetto Gourmet isn’t the only pirate-dining endeavor out there; others include Seattle’s infamous Gypsy, Portland’s now-defunct Ripe and New York’s Coach Peaches. They’re all part of a larger social trend: grouping ourselves according to our interests in communities that bridge the online and offline worlds.

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More than a mailing list

“We use the Internet’s ability to group people based on their curiosities and their interests,” says Townsend. “But we do something that not a lot of people do, and that’s we take that community and make it happen in the real world.”

The Ghetto Gourmet doesn’t just offer aspirational dining in offbeat settings. Along with the food, festivity, and frisson of not-quite-legal restauranting, the Ghet serves to bring people together who might not otherwise have ever met. That fluid social network is essentially based on a growing mailing list, which Townsend says makes for “an incredibly nimble medium.”

“I can throw a dinner with 24 hours’ notice,” says Townsend. The GG mailing list includes more than 7,000 people, which means that its frequent dinner events, generally planned for 30 to 40 guests, never take long to sell out.

Townsend sees the Ghet as part of a larger movement. On the Ghet’s website, he lists a number of similar projects, including Sacramento’s Hidden Kitchen, Austin’s Supper Underground, and Santa Cruz’s Outstanding in the Field.

Miniature papaya salads served at a Ghetto Gourmet dinner.

Townsend enumerates what he sees as the four big forces contributing to the alternative-dining trend: “One, from the environment to nutrition to culture, there’s a growing interest and respect for all things “food”; two, today, our world is very divided, and the need for community is great; three, increasingly, people are working for themselves, starting their own thing, recycling, getting off the grid and doing it themselves; and four, the Internet, (which) makes it easy to find and communicate with like-minded people.”

In some cases, Townsend says, he has been approached by folks looking to start similar projects. He has taken an open-source, non-competitive approach to this, and has used the Ghet’s mailing list to promote outside events. And his team is working on a site meant for networking between alternative diners and those who organize them.