No menu, no venue: Underground supper club dare diners to take leap of faith

ASHEVILLE - Three Asheville food and beverage workers have stepped up to the plate to host a monthly dining series that does away with the formalities.

Nearly a year and a half ago, Jack Sweeney, Will Warmath, and Grey Sigmon launched Not Another Supper Club, an underground event in which diners don't know the menu and have little notice about the venue but attend with an open mind and big appetite.

“We’ve grown as much as the appetite for it has grown,” Sweeney said. “It would have been difficult to do this in another city. It feels like people are open to this kind of thing here, and I hope that it becomes a more normal thing not just here but other cities, too, because dining can look a bunch of different ways.”

The business partners aim to showcase locally farmed, produced and foraged ingredients while improving their culinary and hospitality skills.

“It’s something that we get super excited about because we feel like Asheville has such incredible produce,” said Warmath who touted the area’s agricultural industry, wild food scene, meat producers and butcheries. “It’s an awesome place to cook.”

The eight-course dinners feature approachable, creative recipes presented as individual servings or sharable dishes, like scratch-made country ham biscuits, tortellini or a Choco Taco-inspired brown butter pecan ice cream taco with butterscotch.

Menus reflect seasonal and locally accessible ingredients and what the partners are researching and eating at the time. This winter, they ate their way across Europe.

Cultivating a culinary experience

In May 2022, Not Another Supper Club officially began and has evolved along with the culinary partners’ talents.

Warmath, who has worked at a farm in Colorado and as an assistant manager at The Culinary Gardener farm in Weaverville, often brought home vegetables for the longtime friends and roommates to cook.

Then, they built a table on the back deck of their Asheville home to entertain friends, which is where the supper club idea began to take root.

The catalyst was a 12-course dinner for a college friend and his family visiting from out of town, which led to hosting a paid, four-course meal for invited friends.

Now, Not Another Supper Club's public, ticketed events are hosted on Mondays and Tuesdays of each month with fewer than 30 guests at each. The days were selected so service industry workers may attend as this is when restaurants are typically closed.

Sweeney is a cook at Cucina 24, and Warmath and Sigmon are a cook and the bar manager, respectively, at Tall John’s.

Not Another Supper Club, which is not affiliated with the restaurants, has given the self-taught culinary artists a place to bring their cooking styles and recipes to the forefront.

“Through the process of cooking at restaurants and doing this, we’ve grown a lot,” said Sweeney.  “This has been a good excuse to learn how to cook and that’s the exciting part for me ― to see how Will and I have gotten better at cooking.”

Dining with Not Another Supper Club

Event venues have included Mother, a bakery and café on the South Slope, but most often a private, undisclosed property in the Asheville area.

Traditionally at supper clubs, guests receive the address of the location not long before the event.

“A lot of the people who come have come before and have been with us for a little while so they’re pretty familiar with how it goes,” Sigmon said. “Sometimes we switch it up and they don’t know. They’re just coming to eat food and most of the time they’re willing to follow us around.”

Guests are seated between two large communal tables but are encouraged to interact with diners they don’t know.

The February 25-26 dinners, priced at $75, are sold out. The March dates and ticket sale information will be announced online on social media about three weeks before the event.

“There’s a lot to learn and we do learn a lot at the restaurants we work at, but it’s been fun to challenge ourselves and have an audience who’s willing to come into a menu blind and not know what they’re going to be served. I’m grateful people have trusted us like that,” Sweeney said.

Not Another Supper Club

Where: Various locations.

When: Monthly events announced online.

Info: For more, visit notanother-avl.com or follow on Instagram @notanotheravl.

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Tiana Kennell is the food and dining reporter for the Asheville Citizen Times, part of the USA Today Network. Email her at [email protected] or follow her on Instagram @PrincessOfPage. Please support this type of journalism with a subscription to the Citizen Times.

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Not Another Supper Club take traditional dining to next level