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Issue Date: December 11, 2005
Parties
Good potluck
Supper club members share their tips for creating a great dining experience.
By Natalie Ermann Russell
Looking for a new way to share your culinary prowess? Start -- or join -- a supper club, a monthly potluck for food-loving folks where menus are carefully crafted, home cooking is revered, and no one gets stuck doing all the work.
Try to assemble a group with at least a couple of common interests beyond food.
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Supper club menu suggestions regularly appear in magazines and cookbooks, but what about membership tips? That void is being filled right here. Heed these cautionary tales, and mind these lessons learned. And remember, sometimes it's not what you serve, it's who you serve.
Keep business out of it
"Our idea for the club is to have special evenings where we can enjoy good food, good wine and good company," says potlucker Jen. (We'll use first names only here -- we don't want a boiled bunny dropped on anyone's doorstep.) But her group ran into trouble when one member began pushing his financial services on another member. "This was not pitching in a professional manner," Jen says. "It was like, 'You must be raking in the bucks. What are you doing with it? Need a financial planner?' "
Awkwardness ensued, and the group soon replaced the pushy pitchman and his wife with another couple.
Lesson No. 1: As a group, establish boundaries early on. Decide what is appropriate behavior (e.g., no sales pitches at the dinner table). And don't be afraid to enforce the rules.
Assemble a comfortable group of people
Owen and his club -- which consisted of him, an unmarried couple and a married couple with two young boys -- connected through a dining forum on a local website. Their potluck gatherings petered out after just three dinners.
"If any of the three groups was unable to attend, it didn't make sense to schedule a dinner," Owen says. "The lack of common social interests also was a factor. We did typically find enough to converse about, but I think if we'd been friends or acquaintances to begin with, it might have made for a stronger desire to meet more regularly. They were all nice, but I wouldn't have chosen to hang out with them were it not for the food connection."
Lesson No. 2: Make sure there are enough people to withstand an inevitable cancellation. And try to assemble a group with at least a few common interests beyond food.
Don't let a break-up break up your group
"We started our dinner club because we were tired of feeling bad if everyone in our large group of friends wasn't invited every time we wanted to get together," Rosemarie says. So they splintered off and started doing dinners with two other couples.
"My friends and I stopped because one of the couples broke up," she says. "We joked all along that we would have to end it if a couple split. But recently, the other [intact] couple called us last-minute for dinner. I told them to come over to our place, and I tracked down the guy from the broken-up couple and invited him, too. So it was the dinner party reunited."
Lesson No. 3: Know when to call it quits. Or, if the group undergoes an upheaval of some sort, at least take a break. Feelings can be too intense if you continue right away.
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