Dinner Clubs

Williamsburg’s Whisk & Ladle, in New Book: Don’t Call Us Hipsters. Or Foodies!

Though some of them are still flying under the radar (you probably didn’t hear about the Dinner Club’s picnic on Governors Island — sorrrrry!), supper clubs are for the most part getting a wee bit overcommercialized and overexposed. As if the prospect of a Food Network/Whisk & Ladle collab weren’t enough, the club is also featured in a book out this week, Secret Suppers, in which Los Angeles Times contributor Jenn Garbee explores, as the subtitle has it, “illegal entrees, covert cocktails, and underground [not anymore!] restaurants” around the country. Of course the book includes recipes (for a drink called the Freshman Girl, in Whisk & Ladle’s case), but it’s a quote from Mark, the math-professor organizer of W&L;, that’s the real keeper.

“We really don’t want to be referred to as hipsters … and we don’t consider W&L; a club with members … and we prefer not to feel like we’re in a restaurant … and we have a real aversion to the term foodie — what member of the species isn’t a foodie, a person who enjoys food? We invite people of all ages, and strive to do so (the oldest guest was seventy-six, the youngest, seventeen) … which keeps a certain hipster demographic from developing.”




So is this Food Network project just another ploy to weed out the hipsters?



Secret Suppers [Amazon]

Williamsburg’s Whisk & Ladle, in New Book: Don’t Call Us Hipsters.