Cooking up communal, non-restaurant experiences in the North Bay.
One August morning, chef John Lyle walked through an orchard shortly after sunrise, seeking Black Mission figs for one of his Chosen Spot pop-up dinners at Luther Burbank Home and Gardens. “When I put those figs on the menu, I had them coming out of my ears,” he says. But on the eve of the dinner, Lyle had difficulty finding that particular variety in Sonoma County.
Every couple of months, Heidi Lundy and Becca Trivelpiece, partners in Wild Onion Catering, cook up a special “supper club” experience for as many as 50 diners in a small Marin County barn. They dream of someday opening a restaurant in Bolinas, a place that “could be more of a destination” for foodies, she says.
When a generator powering lights failed midway through a dinner party in a vineyard at dusk, the 46 diners, who’d each paid $150 for the experience, finished their meal with flashlights. “And it turned out to be a wonderful time for everyone,” says Mark Buckley of Napa Valley Dinner Underground, who organized the event.
These entrepreneurial foodies and designers of good times are gathering adventurous people together in the North Bay for communal dinners that are frequently cloaked in secrecy and mystery, while at other times are well advertised and promoted. They can be designed for 20, 50 or more, depending on each organizer’s catering capacities and the logistics at the locations where the dinners take place. Often, there’s live music or other types of entertainment, such as fire-eaters or belly dancers. Whether referred to as “pop-ups,” “supper clubs” or “underground dinners,” the concept of throwing paid dinner parties in unconventional locales has a widespread, growing appeal.
A common goal of these dinners is to shine a spotlight on local farmers and food producers, whose fruits, vegetables, meat, seafood and other ingredients are the stars of the show, while also providing diners with a one-of-a-kind, non-restaurant experience.
No electricity required
“My role as a professional chef is to help promote local farmers and encourage a sustainable food system,” says Bill Heubel, a chef instructor at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone in St. Helena. For his inaugural Beyond the Kitchen Farm Dinners this summer, the chef solicited several Napa County farms to become involved as a way to promote what they grow.
“These dinners aren’t about me as a chef––they’re about the farmers and giving them the recognition they deserve,” he says. But because “everyone is growing grapes here,” Heubel says, his biggest challenge in organizing the events was trying to find enough Napa-based farmers to actively participate and create a full summer series. He’d hoped to start the dinners in June, but discovered that little, if any, local spring produce was being grown. “Most farmers here are planting strictly summer crops,” he says. “Others, like Big Ranch Farms in Napa, time their plantings to coincide with the opening of the farmers market in May. Even then, quantities can be limited.”
As a result, the six Beyond the Kitchen dinners began in mid-July and wrapped up in late September.
Locations for the dinners included Clerici Ranch near Napa, where the Clerici family raises chickens along with an assortment of produce, and Bale Grist Mill State Historic Park, north of St. Helena. At that event, with the shared table situated in the shadow of the mill, Heubel incorporated grains ground onsite into the food preparation, together with produce sourced from Full Table Farm in Yountville and rare, heritage-breed Buckeye chicken from A Preservation Sanctuary just three miles down the road. Some of the chef’s other Beyond the Kitchen dinners took place at Connolly Ranch, a nonprofit organization and working farm in Napa that connects local area youth with nature through hands-on environmental education and nutrition programs.
Heubel announced the dinners using social networking and by sending out press releases to the local media. Diners were charged $125 per person for five courses paired with local wines, and a portion of the proceeds from the dinners benefited Connolly Ranch.
With the dinners taking place some distance from electrical outlets, Heubel kept it simple. “We cooked using grill boxes with wood chips and about seven propane burners, then had French presses for making after-dinner coffee,” he says. “We didn’t need electricity.” Hurricane lamps provided the soft lighting at the white-tablecloth events.
Heubel solicited assistance from CIA students at the dinners to educate them about “establishing relationships with farmers, how to source ingredients and what it’s like to do events out in the middle of nowhere,” he says. “They left with food and wine, so we took good care of them.”
Targeting San Franciscans
Arranging secretive and exclusive dining experiences for an affluent clientele was the motivation behind Buckley’s Napa Valley Dinner Underground. Working with Calistoga native Tristan Fairbanks, he organized several of the covert dinners in 2011, finding his customers primarily in the Bay Area via Facebook and Twitter postings. Buckley’s day job in sales and marketing for Hahn Family Wines, along with his past experience in retail wine sales at JV Wine & Spirits in Napa, working with At Your Service (a high-end event staffing company) at various wineries in Napa and Sonoma counties and with Componere Fine Catering in Emeryville for events across the Bay Area, gave him access to a large community of local chefs, winery owners and food and beverage managers to help design the dinners.
“My goal was to arrange the events so the diners didn’t know where they were going or who was going to be there,” says Buckley. Using a payment system set up through the Facebook page, customers were charged from $125 to $200 per person, depending on the location, for a five- or six-course dinner with wine. In most cases, they were given instructions and directions to the venues only a few hours before the events.
One of Buckley’s first underground dinners took place at Tournesol, a by-appointment-only winery east of the city of Napa, which hosted 18 diners who he’d connected with through Facebook. “And most of them I didn’t even know,” he adds with a laugh. Chef Boris Olvera, formerly with Franciscan Estate, whipped up the meal in Tournesol’s kitchen.
Word spread quickly after that event, and Buckley’s new enterprise earned a positive review on the UrbanDaddy website, which generated extra buzz for his next dinners. “All of a sudden, my Facebook page lit up with almost 600 ‘likes’ and I started getting lots of calls.”
More than 40 people, most from San Francisco and the East Bay, eagerly signed on for the next dinner without knowing their destination (David Fulton Winery in St. Helena) or what was on the menu. “I chartered a bus from San Francisco, and the guests paid for the cost of that––$65 per person––as well as the cost of the dinner, at $150 per person,” he says. “All they knew was they were coming to Napa Valley, but not exactly where.”
San Franciscans are Buckley’s target audience, he says. “They like to come to Napa Valley, they have money to spend, and they’re looking for something different. They want a unique experience.”
After the success of that dinner, Buckley mounted a couple of smaller events, and then tested the waters for a Friday night repast. “It was much tougher to get people to commit to a Friday night [instead of Saturday],” he says. “Then my chef bailed on me and the location fell through. So it ended up being a small Friday dinner party made up of friends and people in the wine trade.”
One of Buckley’s last pop-ups in 2011, the time the generator left diners in darkness before flashlights saved the meal, featured a few vegetables grown in Thomas Keller’s gardens at the French Laundry. “I had some connections for that,” explains Buckley, “and that particular dinner was really more of a farm-to-table event.”
Buckley’s attempts at arranging similar hush-hush dinners in 2012 failed to gain as much traction, despite the popularity of the 2011 season. “We’re building and learning from what we did last year,” he says. “For the most part, the participants were happy with their experience, but there were a few who wanted something way beyond what we offered.”
Though Buckley consulted with the chefs to accommodate diners with food allergies or other dietary restrictions, it made planning the menus more complex. “You can work around those things, but they do constrain you a bit and it can end up costing more,” he says. “Those people might as well go to a restaurant and order what they want.” He says he came away from the experience with a renewed respect for chefs and the challenges they encounter. The first Harvest Underground Dinner 2012 took place September 28; eight diners from Pennsylvania and Napa plunked down $200 each for a seven-course dinner at Suscol Ranch Vineyard Estate featuring winemaker Alison Crowe (Garnet Vineyards). Buckley is now setting his sights on arranging similar events during the off-season in Napa Valley. “In winter, I think people are looking for more things to do here,” he says. “But I’m trying not to take on too much. Dinners for about 20 people are a reasonable size.”
Not a money maker, but a passion
For their Sunday night Wild Onion Supper Club, scheduled every other month year-round, Lundy and Trivelpiece serve produce and meat from Marin County growers such as Star Route Farms (where Lundy also works), Fresh Run Farm and Marin Sun Farms. The dinners are typically four or five courses and take place in the refurbished barn at Gospel Flat Farm in Bolinas, decorated in a specific theme.
Live music and locally created artwork are also part of the Wild Onion experience. In August the supper club had a Mediterranean vibe, with entertainment by belly dancers and the interior of the barn decorated “so you felt as if you were out in a desert somewhere,” as Lundy describes it. The next dinner was scheduled for October 28.
Some loyal diners on Wild Onion’s mailing list haven’t missed a single meal since Lundy and Trivelpiece launched the club two years ago. “The supper club is technically open to the public––first-come, first-served. But it’s basically like having 50 of your closest friends come for dinner,” says Lundy. The club’s Facebook page is where potential diners can view photos of past suppers and send messages of inquiry.
Lundy says she and Trivelpiece, who also operate Wild Onion Catering & Events together and also have other jobs, are trying to provide people with a great experience by sourcing all local and organic food. Menus are usually fine-tuned three weeks in advance of each dinner, but can sometimes change up to the last minute. “For one dinner I’d planned on using artichokes, but then there were none,” she remembers, explaining that she replaced the dish with another vegetable offering.
Diners at the Wild Onion Supper Club donate $75 per person in advance, “and that basically covers our costs,” says Lundy. No food is donated and all the money collected is spent on the dinner ingredients, the barn, the music and for paying the servers when possible (patrons are encouraged to tip their servers, who are either volunteers or paid a nominal sum). “It’s not a money maker for us, it’s a passion,” she adds. “It generates a whole swirl of creative energy, and that’s been fun to watch. It’s like a second little economy.”
New culinary event space
Sondra Bernstein has years of experience running restaurants and catering private events in Sonoma Valley. Her latest venture is a multi-purpose culinary event space dubbed Suite D, located in the Vineburg industrial area southeast of the city of Sonoma. To launch the triangular-shaped venue, Bernstein raised $30,000 through the Kickstarter online funding platform for creative projects.
“Now I’m getting calls like crazy,” she says, from people interested in booking the space. “We’re calling Suite D a ‘girl & the fig project,’” referring to her flagship restaurant on the Sonoma Plaza.
Suite D is off the beaten tourist track in the Eighth Street winery and warehouse area south of Napa Road. “It definitely has a funky feel,” Bernstein says. “It’s an urban environment with a lot of manufacturing and wine industry operations going on all around it.” The space can accommodate as many as 72 people for a sit-down dinner, and cocktail parties for that many or more. Cooking classes instructed by chefs from her restaurants and pop-up dinners might be on the schedule soon, too. “We’re slowly trying to see what will work, doing one event at a time,” she adds.
Bernstein has mixed feelings about the “underground” dining scene, particularly those operations that might be flying below the radar of the health department. “I think people are trying to figure out how to be independent and share what they love, but it can be expensive to comply with all the rules and regulations—and who’s to say that all those rules make sense for everyone?” she says.
Most pop-up presenters are passionate about food, cognizant of safe food handling regulations and strive to “do it right,” she continues, but while “on one level, it’s nice to see that [kind of creativity] going on, as the diner, you need to realize there’s personal responsibility involved if you choose to go off the grid. You can sometimes take risks.”
Bernstein, who stresses that Suite D is fully compliant with state and county regulations, says she once attended a large, farm-to-table-style dinner at a local produce farm, arranged by a Santa Cruz-based organizer of such events. “There were probably 150 people, and the concept was lovely, but I had higher expectations. It didn’t feel as good as I wanted it to feel. The experience was good, but not great.”
People will always want to try new and different cuisine, admits Bernstein, and some foodies are constantly seeking the latest and trendiest culinary happening. “And with social media, it’s so much easier to find them now,” she adds. “Besides, there’s some great chef talent out there with no place to show it off.”
Pop-ups as a launching pad
To show off his talent a couple of years ago, chef Mateo Granados organized a series of pop-up dinners in Sonoma County that he called Tendejon de la Calle (“Taste of the Street”), cooking his modern Yucatan-style cuisine at nontraditional dining locales such as vineyards, warehouses and farms. He was already known for his tamales at area farmers’ markets and also for his time behind the stoves at Dry Creek Kitchen, but it was those pop-up dinners that cemented his reputation and ultimately led him to open his own Healdsburg restaurant, Mateo’s Cocina Latina, last year.
This summer, Granados offered pop-up dinners with rotisseried meats on the patio of his restaurant mid-week for a fixed price of $35 per person. Suckling pig from Black Sheep Farm was featured Wednesday nights, and Preston Vineyards’ lamb on Thursday nights. Chicken raised at Felton Acres was offered both nights (but discontinued after the first few in favor of the more popular meats), along with side dishes made with ingredients sourced from such local growers as Laguna Farm and Front Porch Farm.
Lyle style
John Lyle, the force behind the popular pop-up dinners at Luther Burbank Home and Gardens for the past two summers, is an activist who uses food for fundraising through his venture called Hardcore Farm to Face (“our slogan is ‘We do good for nothing,’” he says). Along with other Sonoma County chefs donating their time and talents, Lyle organizes his Chosen Spot events at the epicenter of what the plant wizard Burbank called “…the chosen spot of all this earth as far as nature is concerned.”
“Much of the food for the dinners is donated or we get a really good price,” says Lyle. “We have people who give us an entire hog or large amounts of salmon, and we get loaner equipment to cook the meal, and people even donate things like the napkins. In this day and age, when so many are having a hard time, we’re blown away by the amount of support.”
Lyle says the popularity of the Chosen Spot dinners last year raised it from a “semi-underground” state to completely public. “We’re a little more commercial than most pop-ups, because the dinners raise money for Luther Burbank Gardens. But we still try to make every experience amazing for the diners. We show them a snapshot of what’s happening on the farms in Sonoma County on that very day.”
The potential for more pop-up dinner opportunities “is really phenomenal,” says Lyle, predicting, “It’s something that hasn’t yet reached every area, but in a year or two, most people will know what a pop-up is.”
Jean Saylor Doppenberg is the author of three books: Food Lovers’ Guide to Napa Valley, Food Lovers’ Guide to Sonoma, and Insiders’ Guide to California’s Wine Country.
