OUR EXPERIENCES
There’s a truth to eating with strangers in strange places...
It shakes loose the familiar, the safe and the predictable, and leaves you raw, curious, and hungry for more. Our experiences aren’t just dinners. They are chapters in a life written with fire, spice, laughter and the kind of details you’ll carry home in your memories long after the plates are cleared.
Chapter I: Je Ne Sais Quoi
'There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production.' — Hunter S Thompson
Before Britain had a culinary ladder—before the notion was anything other than a mischief—there were foundations, pioneers, dreamers. And dreamers need only a cradle.
Above a bawdy Soho boozer, the dining room of the French House rocks assuredly. Charles De Gaulle may have written his best speech here, but its kitchen was established by the revolutionary Fergus Henderson—Supper Club’s first crush.
Some of the meat was obscure and faintly illicit, but that was the crowd. Gourmands and creatives alike. They shared a purpose. They would define something. They didn’t yet know what.
Generations later, there’s another maverick chef at the helm—polyglot, raconteur and Smart grandee Neil Borthwick is adding his own verse to the French canon with such fluent obscenity that one wonders how the neighbourhood got by without him.
There’s a certain… panache to these characters. Or it could be the cradle. Hard to say. But the cats will be heading home when we occupy it for our inaugural supper on the 10th of March.
Chapter 7: The Feast of Freetown
“I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.” — Anais Nin.
There are the things we do, and the things we cannot do without. We cannot do without supper. But a feast? A feast is an admission of soul. One mustn’t let it slip in any old place. It demands a cathedral.
Chapter 6: The Professor’s Table Manners
“I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.” – Rainer Maria Rilke
A gourmand’s nature is at once both greedy and generous.
Born sensualists, they are hell-bent on painting with every colour from the start. They want what they want, the very best, and if that means shlepping halfway across the world in search of the decisive curry of their lives, then so be it—the prize is theirs alone.