The dinner was an elegant event. Twelve diners, evenly matched by gender and largely strangers to one another, had paid $125 a person to enjoy a five-course meal steeped in patrician privilege.
Courses, each paired with wine, included savory broths served in tiny cups and textured, fruity, palate-cleansing foams offered between dishes of caviar, foie gras and lobster. Dessert was a rich, butterscotch-flavored cheesecake whose delicate carvings of rose buds flecked with gold leaf blossomed in a glossy beige icing.
The venue for the gathering was not a chef’s table or the private dining room in some expensive, multistarred French restaurant. Instead, the meal was served in a private home in a historic townhouse in Boston’s Beacon Hill section, and for all of the affair’s opulence, the event was as illegal as drinking at a speakeasy would have been during Prohibition.
Welcome to one of the more upscale manifestations of the national phenomenon of underground dining, an unregulated and largely untraceable industry in which amateur and professional chefs court avid gourmands through the Internet, e-mail or word-of-mouth to participate for a fee in dinner parties that are cloaked in secrecy.
Across the country underground dining is siphoning business from traditional restaurants as patrons seek out intimate settings and interaction between strangers that is not possible in most eateries. But while customers of such venues enjoy the experience of having a dinner party without the hassle, health department and other officials worry that those who offer underground dining are putting their customers at risk. Not only are such ventures unlicensed, but their purveyors may lack food-handling education and ignore fire codes. Further, such events, where thousands of dollars can change hands, do not contribute to the tax base.
In addition, some organizers of underground dining events who work in restaurants may be profiting at their employers’ expense by pilfering costly goods from their bosses’ inventory for the clandestine affairs.
Yet the stigma of illegitimacy means little to enthusiastic chefs who conduct underground-dining or to the in-crowd patrons willing to pay for the discreet events.
“I don’t see myself as a criminal,” said Tamara Reynolds, the only covert chef who was willing to be fully identified in this article.
Reynolds, with culinary training and an Arizona food handler’s license, does not have a food handler’s license in New York, where she and a partner operate a private-dining club in various locations around Astoria, Queens, about once a month at $25 a head. Her parties range in size from 12 to 16 people.
Reynolds’ menu is devoted to classic Southern cuisine and features the two-days-to-make fried chicken recipe of Edna Lewis, the grand dame of Southern cooking.
“The price we charge just covers the cost of ingredients,” Reynolds said. “The guests put their money in a cash box, and if it ever comes up, if someone from government were to challenge us, we’d just say the money is a donation to something. Sometimes, I don’t know if our guests paid or not.
“We just charge enough to take care of the food and to pay the guy who washes the dishes.”
Reynolds, also in the wine business and a travel writer who appeared on National Public Radio to discuss New York’s underground dining scene, said the secret world of gourmet dining thrives because commercial full-service restaurants can’t match the conviviality of a small dinner party.
“It’s friends, friends of friends and people who will become friends,” said Reynolds, who has a book coming out in 2009 extolling home dinner parties called “F**king Delicious.”
The only way for a stranger to be invited to one of Reynolds’ private dinner parties is by sending her an e-mail at
“Then after an interview process where we vet the person to make sure they are not a serial killer, we might tell them where the next event will be,” she said.
The ability to pick and choose guests and limit menus to what the chef deigns to serve are among the perks of underground dining. Just as important, though, is the ability of guests to mingle with strangers of similar backgrounds and class. In other words, the potential to make a love connection or a career contact in an eating-and-drinking hideaway is one of the big attractions for the young, hip and affluent.
“People are looking for new things to try and new ways to meet people,” said Sumi DeBenedittis, a recently married, 32-year-old industry relations and business development executive for PepsiCo Foodservice who, when single, attended a private-dining club in Manhattan called Homeslice four times.
Reachable only through referrals of previous diners or the Internet, Homeslice holds its dinners for parties of as many as 20 in apartments throughout Manhattan. The cooks are two women who are more like social butterflies in encouraging their guests to mingle, DeBenedittis said.
“The Homeslice girls are really about bringing people together,” she said. “It’s such a unique dining experience and is a [better] alternative to Saturday night dinner at a restaurant and taking the chance of meeting people at a bar, especially in a city like New York.”
Although the chance to meet Mr. or Miss Right is a powerful motivator for supporting clandestine dining ventures, the activity is illegal everywhere it exists.
Take that posh Boston meal as a case in point. Zack, the chef and host who would be identified only by his nickname, develops websites for mutual funds and insurance companies during the day. But once a month, in some of Boston’s most prestigious homes, he invites for a hefty fee a network of acquaintances, carefully arranged by gender, who are unknown to one another but share his passion for rich dining.
Boasting that he has always had a flair for cooking and has taken a few courses, Zack admits he has never taken a commercial food safety class or taken a food handler’s test. He has no business license and thus he reports no retail sales for tax purposes to the city of Boston. In addition, the places where he holds the dinners are private homes that have never been inspected by the fire department, as commercial foodservice establishments are. Therefore, he does not pay fees for an approved fire escape plan or approved fire code inspection certificate.
Hilary Karasz, a spokeswoman for the Seattle & King County Public Health Department, admitted that the agency knows little about hidden dining societies or the perils they may or may not be posing to the public. She said the main reason why the agency knows little about underground dining is because the health department, like their peers everywhere, only inspects foodservice operations with business permits.
“Kind of hard to inspect a business if we don’t know it exists,” she said.
Meanwhile, Seattle is one of the capitals of underground dining. A simple Google search turned up 14 active, anti-establishment dining outlets in Seattle. By contrast, New York has about nine such ventures that Google could find, all but three in Brooklyn. Washington, D.C.; Chicago; the San Francisco Bay Area; Miami; Memphis, Tenn.; and other notable cities have as many as six to 12 apiece.
In Seattle, one underground dining club, Gypsy, promotes its by-invitation-only events through a slick, multipage, interactive website that boasts the names of at least a dozen of the city’s top chefs who have participated in the past. Efforts to reach several by phone or e-mail were not successful.
A woman who would only identify herself as Lorna and who operates a nonmainstream dining club called Cache, also in Seattle, said in an e-mail: “We are not interested in doing any more press. We are too busy as it is, and would like to keep our dinners as ‘underground’ as possible.”
Francine Maroukian, a food and wine writer for Esquire magazine, suspects that one reason Seattle is such a hotbed for subterranean dining is that the city’s commercial restaurants popularized the use of communal tables, where strangers can dine together.
Michelle, who with a friend runs a secret-dining network in Milwaukee called Sub Rosa that specializes in vegan meals for as many as 80 people, said her work is not easy. Michelle said she scheduled monthly dinners when Sub Rosa started up last summer. But because of the time and preparation it takes to pull each dinner off, she has scaled back to every other month. The only way to attend is by word-of-mouth referrals from others who have attended.
“It’s just became a lot of work,” she said. “We enjoy doing it because it becomes such a beautiful event with beautiful people and they just enjoy themselves so much.
“We charge just enough to cover our food costs. We’re not making any money at it.”