A new clutch of offbeat dinner clubs showcase both young chefs and very old Louisiana traditions.
Start talking about Louisiana food and inevitably you get into the differences and relationship between Cajun and Creole, country and city, brown jambalaya and red jambalaya. But of course things are more complex than that, and just as there’s more than one definition of Creole, even in the culinary realm, there’s more than one kind of Cajun cooking too.
I was reminded of this recently when I sat down for a meal at the Mosquito Supper Club, a monthly dining event hosted in a beautifully refurbished one-time corner store in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans.
Melissa Martin is the chef behind this, and she’s from bayou country, from the small Terrebonne Parish fishing village of Chauvin, Louisiana. Each course at her Mosquito Supper Club was not just representative of Cajun cooking — it was highly particular to her own sub-region of Acadiana, and more importantly, it was particular to her family's own experience at the dinner table.
So this meal, presented for about two dozen people seated together around two long tables, unfolded with big home-style black pots of seafood gumbo, fresh-from-the-garden cucumber and tomato salads, crawfish boulettes, stuffed crabs arrayed by the platter, and for dessert, bright pink rogue pop ice cream, based on the old soda flavor. Drinks for this dinner were a self-serve proposition, with beer and wine waiting in an ice chest and a blackboard to mark your own honor system tally.
It was a highly specific meal, curated and personal for its chef, and much different from a conventional eatery or even the typical pop-up restaurant. But it was par for the course for a style of dining that's getting new attention in New Orleans, sometimes called supper clubs, or dinner clubs or just private dining events.
The best known example in New Orleans comes from a company called Dinner Lab, which started here and has expanded quickly to other cities around the country. Sign up to become a member, and you get invited to an ever-evolving schedule of dinners, prepared by a wide-ranging stable of chefs and hosted in unconventional locations.
Others have emerged more recently. Mosquito Supper Club is open to anyone who snags a reservation on its web site. The same goes for PDR, industry parlance for private dining room, another ongoing dining event created by Rita Bernhardt. She hosts these dinners each week in the living room of her home in the Tremé neighborhood, setting a long table for a dozen people, and cooking a five-course restaurant-style meal from her kitchen.
Now I can hear people asking the question. In a city like New Orleans, teeming with great restaurants, do we really need to seek out a makeshift kitchen? But these examples offer something very different from the traditional restaurant meal. Whether it's seeing a young chef working out new ideas in her own home, or experiencing a bayou family’s old traditions distilled for a group dinner, these are not replacements for the restaurant experience but another turn in our ongoing conversation about food.
And, as a bonus to the supper club format, these evenings can unfold like a dinner party where no one feels guilty when the host is stuck in the kitchen the whole time.
Find details on these dining happenings and their upcoming events at their websites:
