the accidental supper club

A neighborhood known for its culinary aptitude, Astoria’s main thoroughfares are lined with restaurants and cafes. But it’s also home to a less visible dining experience. Two or three times, a month, Tamara Reynolds and Zora O’Neill run what some would call an underground supper club, serving dinner to groups of strangers.

It’s a concept at which many New Yorkers would recoil: opening the door to hungry people armed with wine. But it’s something the two have been doing since 2003, when they were some of the first in the city to do it. Reynolds and O’Neill met working together at a restaurant and began cooking dinner together on Sundays, when HBO’s programming was best.

“All the sudden everyone wanted to come and people wanted to invite their friends,” Reynolds said. Eventually, the two started asking for $15 donations, turning a casual pastime into a more organized affair: The Sunday Night Dinner in Astoria.

“That just opened the floodgates,” said Reynolds, a caterer, freelance writer and author. “First of all, everybody gave $20. But it also made people feel like they were no longer worrying that they were trotting on our hospitality.”

Taking various shapes, underground supper clubs have been popular in major cities worldwide for the past few years. In Cuba, family-owned paladares have been around for much, much longer.

When Reynolds and O’Neill started out, Sunday Night Dinner was one of just two known supper clubs in New York City. The other, The Ghetto Gourmet, began on the West Coast.

“It was so different the first time somebody came who we didn’t know,” Reynolds said as she described the rise of the project. “We’re like the accidental supper club.”

Invites are typically word-of-mouth. When Reynolds read a WNYC essay about her Fourth of July tradition—every year, she makes fried chicken and reads the Declaration of Independence—traffic went up. When she did an interview on the Brian Lehrer show with two other women running supper clubs, she got 400 e-mails.

“It’s not an exclusive thing—we’re not like, ‘Oh, are you cool enough to come to dinner?’” she said. Dinners, which are limited to 20 people, usually sell out within 15 to 45 minutes. The menu is preset, and those with food allergies and picky taste might as well leave them at the door.

“I have the distinct pleasure of getting to cook what I feel like cooking, and most often it’s something that I’ve never cooked before,” Reynolds said, adding menus are usually guided by season. The chefs use local products, from deer provided by their friend “John the Hunter” to tomatoes, chard, green beans and herbs Reynolds grows in her Astoria backyard.

In September, they hosted a party with guests seated by candlelight around an L-shaped table. The evening’s menu included fried green tomatoes, dandy green salad with candied bacon, crack ham—glazed with bourbon, Dijon, brown sugar, orange juice and molasses—tomato, bread and butter casserole and zucchini. Diners, many strangers to each other, brought their own wine and chatted with each other as the hosts made their way around the kitchen.

Reynolds said she has never been to another New York City supper club. Many of them are, in her opinion, “very velvet ropey.”

But O’Neill ran her own for about nine months after 9/11, inspired by someone she met in Amsterdam. She said although the feedback and experience were helpful, she ended up losing money on the four-course meals paired with wine, for which she charged between $35 and $50.

These days, the Sunday Night dinners cost $35. But despite their popularity, the chefs don’t bring in much, O’Neill said—maybe $40 each. Much of their success is coming in other forms. This fall, they made international tummies growl when they were asked to host a party for Jamie Oliver’s Jamie’s American Roadtrip, which aired in the U.K. in September. (A rainy day forced them to rework their menu the morning of the shoot. “It was hilarious, but it worked out fine,” Reynolds said.)

The two also released their first cookbook this fall, a project they’ve been working on for a couple of years. Forking Fanstastic, which came out last week, features recipes the two have prepared for their dinner parties over the years.

“Our hope is that the cookbook will inspire more people to cook,” O’Neill said. “It is a special thing that a lot of people don’t get enough of.”