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"Out Late" is Time Out's nightlife and party column by DJ, Whorechata founder, and Staff Writer Ian Kumamoto, which will publish every other Tuesday. The previous edition was a look inside Dick Appointment’s fifth anniversary party.
To me, the word "supper" is a relic of another time, conjuring images of people slurping canned soup on crochet tabletops. Yet, more and more, the word has wiggled its way into the lexicon of hot and tired twenty-and-thirty-something New Yorkers, who are turning to so-called "supper clubs" to meet, mingle, and hook up.
Supper clubs are nothing new, obviously. In the U.S., they gained popularity in the 1930s and 40s, where they became places for patrons to escape and while away their postwar lives, starting with cocktail hours and dinner before dragging late into the night in the form of live entertainment. The supper clubs of today—many created post-pandemic, many thriving— similarly serve as a diversion from the mundanity of modern human interaction. In an age of flimsy online connections, they're becoming an attractive alternative for people who are over the fakery of it all.
Recently, I attended my first supper club, Dine with Dez, which is hosted by Desmond Sam and his business partner Ramses Rubio. Admittedly, I met Dez at a party last summer and we were both incoherently drunk when we spoke, but I've since seen his supper club grow from a distance. The main draw of Dez's dinners is that they always involve celebrity guests, and when I saw that the latest dinner would have Jojo Siwa join, I begged him to save me a seat.
Dez is that one friend who just seems to be connected to everyone. Throughout his career in PR and nightlife, he served as a natural link between people he knew, some of whom became besties, business partners, and more. Last year, he decided it was no longer efficient to create endless strings of text threads to introduce people to each other, which is how he came to the idea of creating a dinner series. "When you hear 'dinner,' it comes off relaxed, you approach it with your guard down," he tells me. "It just feels more intimate and sexy."
When you hear 'dinner,' it comes off relaxed, you approach it with your guard down.
When Art Basel in Miami rolled around in June of 2023, Dez tested out his first dinner. "This was a chance to get the most fabulous friends that I have in one space," Dez tells me. He ended up inviting the Clermont Twins, the model Yves Chery, and others. "It was just a really beautiful night," he remembers. Galore ended up writing about the party, and that’s when things really kicked off.
But at the heart of the dinners was a way for Dez wanted something beyond nightlife. "How much conversation can you really have at a nightclub with blaring music?!" Dez exasperates. "To me the club is more so a church, especially for the queer community, that's where we are able to be free. But as I get older, being able to build a business and break bread is more beneficial to the growth of what I want to do than just meeting on the dance floor." He talks about how, as we leave our early 20s, we simply expect more out of our relationships.
Another aspect is the undeniably dark underbelly of nightlife. "As beautiful as nightlife is, I have lost a lot of people to it," Dez tells me. "I would hate to see nightlife destroy me."
This desire for socializing in deeper and less self-destructive ways was a common thread I found throughout my conversations with other late 20-something and early 30-something year-olds who run supper clubs.
In an age of flimsy online connections, they're becoming an attractive alternative for people who are over the fakery of it all.
That Dinner Thing is a supper club run by Sierra Lai, Ryn Adkins and Claire Chatinover, three friends based in Brooklyn. In 2022, when Lai was going through a bad breakup, she was feeling the need to connect. She got together with Adkins and Chatinover to start a dinner party.
Now, they host their dinner once every two months, and each dinner has a one word theme that grounds the menu. They also incorporate the word into a thought-provoking question they ask guests before their meal, something they implemented after reading The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker, who notes that every successful gathering has a purpose. Previous words they’ve used as themes include "expansion," "duality," "sonder" and "splendor," and they ask open-ended questions like "What’s something that brought you splendor recently?"
Tickets to That Dinner Thing can only be bought in pairs. It's a way to make the guests more comfortable, but Lai says it's also a way to find an excuse to invite someone you want to get closer to. "You might invite the cute guy you see in the coffeeshop every day," Lai says. "It's less weird to talk to them when you have a concrete reason, like telling them you have tickets to a dinner party." Their current dinners happen in a refurbished brownstone in Clinton Hill, and the goal is always to create connections that will go beyond the table. "The chances of meeting someone you actually like is higher at a supper club than at a nightclub," says Lai.
The chances of meeting someone you actually like is higher at a supper club than at a nightclub.
For other supper clubs, building connection is a matter of having the highest possible quality of food. The Sewing Tin was started by Akhil Upad, who came up with the dinner series' name, and Aditya Mishra.
The two met while working at several restaurants across the city, including Michelin Star restaurants. While working in the restaurant business the friends quickly realized that the hours in the kitchen robbed them of a personal life and the chance to connect with customers, so The Sewing Tin was their way of fostering their own community. The name is inspired by a common immigrant motif, the allegorical cookie box that you climb up and open as a child, only to find it’s being used for sewing supplies. That’s what food in New York is like in some restaurants: Something might look very elevated but once you bite into it, it brings back primal memories. It’s that sense of surprise and familiarity that Mishra hopes strangers at his dinner bond over.
"I think one of the reasons supper clubs are booming is because it's a place where you can meet people that are already curated," Mishra says. "Because not everyone is willing to share a meal with strangers at a communal table, it takes a certain type of person."
There are also supper clubs that are stationary, like the brand new So & So’s Supper Club at Romer Hotel in Hell’s Kitchen. Those are often geared towards an older clientele who are not quite ready to call it quits on enjoying a few drinks here and there. "My generation, Gen X, and maybe the older generation are looking for entertainment but they’re not looking to stay out until 2am every week," Patric Yumul, CEO of TableOne Hospitality, tells me. "And with the younger generation, there's a desire for yesteryear and to be able to have a transportive interaction with things they might see on TV and movies." When someone walks in, Yumul wants people to have an instant emotional reaction, like being transported into Goodfellas or a Hells Kitchen version of Bemelmans.
There's a desire for yesteryear and to be able to have a transportive interaction.
Part of creating making So & So’s a supper club was to give out 100 memberships to people they considered staples of the surrounding neighborhood, like bodega owners, Broadway singers, and longtime residents with good vibes.
That seemed to be a central part of supper clubs: They carefully curate who gets to be there.
The latest Dining with Dez took place in the basement of Ray’s in the Lower East Side and was invite-only. The bar had special edition Jojo Siwa-themed cocktails like a Karmatini (Grey Goose vodka with Mr. Black coffee liqueur) and the Jojo Rita (a margarita with Codigo Blanco tequila).
I wasn’t allowed to sit at Siwa’s table, which I was disappointed by. My buddy for the night ended up being Erica Campbell, the music editor of PAPER Magazine who, as one of the only other people in the room who wasn’t a reality TV star, was destined to sit next to me.
Peace, love, and karma’s a bitch!
At one point before we started eating, Siwa stood up to give a toast. "I know a lot of us in this room are strangers, but I want to say thank you for coming," she said. She spoke some more before she ended with, "Peace, love, and karma’s a bitch!"
I was lucky that Campbell and I hit it off and there was no lull in the conversation throughout the two hour dinner. In fact, we rode the train to Brooklyn home together and talked about our disastrous love lives. I got home at a sensible 10:30pm. A week later, when I told Dez about how much more sustainable I felt this was than partying—I still got drunk, but not enough to ruin the next day—he validated me in those feelings. "We need to shift space to make room for the next generation in nightlife," Dez told me. "There’s a whole generation that needs the dance floor more than we do."
I didn't know if he was calling us old. What I do know is that you’ll likely find me at more supper clubs.
How to attend the supper clubs featured here
Where: Locations for the supper clubs vary, but the ones mentioned in this piece happen mostly in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
When: For updated information follow each supper club on Instagram, which are hyperlinked throughout this piece. For Dining with Dez, sign up for their newsletter.
Cost: $100+
How to get in: Each supper club has different policies. Some require you to buy 2 tickets at a time. Visit their profiles for more information.
The vibe: Intimate.
What to wear: Something comfy