Location, Location, Location
Location is very important as part of the experience. From an empty swimming pool, to an open air cinema, an empty supermarket, a church, a terrace and a port are some of the ideas. And the list can go on and the imagination is infinite.
Early in America, the word “dinner” began to mark a line between country and city. Dinner had never been anchored in time; it was defined not by the hour it took place but by the size and heft of the meal, its roots in the Vulgar Latin disjejunare (to break a fast). If you were tilling the land, logic dictated you fortify yourself with dinner at noon, having been up since dawn, and end the evening with supper, historically lighter fare, its name derived from the Old French souper, with its hint of sipping broth and sopping it up with bread, and the Old English supan, which originally meant simply “to drink” (often to excess).
“SUPPER IS THE most intimate meal there is,” Emily Post wrote in “Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home” (1922), “since none but family or closest friends are ever included.” At a supper club, the notion of family and friends was always more fluid. “It open-armed everyone,” said the writer and New York restaurateur Brian Bartels, who grew up in Reedsburg, Wis., and got his first job as a busboy at age 15 at the iconic Ishnala Supper Club on Mirror Lake, which he still holds up as a model of a convivial retreat with “the polish of fine dining, but accessible.”
ABOVE: Pop-up dinners are becoming the hot approach creating a sense of urgency, exclusivity and buzz. Examples of different locations and settings.