“If Paul Prudhomme were dead, he’d be rolling in his grave,” says Chris MacGillivray as he seasons his gumbo with a few decidedly nontraditional ingredients: sherry vinegar, agave syrup, and butter.
The gumbo is a sauce for what MacGillivray calls an “Asian-Cajun dish”—Andouille sausage and shrimp-filled shumai dumplings garnished with a cross-section of fried okra.
It is the third course of Noble Swine Supper Club’s August dinner, hosted by the owners of Crema, a scruffy luncheonette/coffee shop in the heart of Denver’s warehouse district north of Coors field.
The Noble Swine Supper Club, a loose collective of line cooks, chefs, managers, servers and sommeliers, has been around since 2010. Liz Batkin, a front-of-the-house manager who calls herself the Club’s “cat herder,” describes Noble Swine as a “floating dinner party.” Batkin prefers to limit the events to about 30 people and mix half regulars with half newcomers.
Noble Swine events feature place cards with assigned seating (“we aim to inspire unexpected community” the website declares). Democratic, informal, inexpensive to mount, spontaneous, and often wildly varying in quality, supper clubs are the perfect culinary vehicle for the Internet age—they are the culinary equivalent of blogs. Unlike pop-up restaurants, which usually offer an a la carte menu and can run as long as several months, a supper club offers one fixed menu and a single seating. But both formats give otherwise unheralded cooks the opportunity to flex and shine.
Batkin’s husband, Andrew Van Stee, a slender, bearded wood-oven cook at Potager who helped found Noble Swine, enjoys the freedom to experiment and the freedom from having to run Noble Swine as a for-profit business.
Traditional restaurant kitchens are usually the expression of the vision and personality of one person and value consistency and obedience to that vision. In a supper club, mistakes, experimentation, involved group discussion, and last-minute, improvisations are not frowned upon but actively encouraged. The menus are, more or less, conceived and executed collectively.
A group e-mail about the event goes out about two weeks beforehand, listing the date and the site. Previous sites have included warehouses, empty apartments, and backyards. The menu is unknown to the guests until they sit down, but most of the regulars like that just fine. “You’re going out on a limb, but it’s a controlled limb,” says Carl Nixon, a regular who describes himself as an Internet abuse analyst.
An hour before a recent 7 o’clock dinner, the dining room at Crema is empty of people and furniture. But by 6:30, two folding tables and a few dozen mismatched chairs have been set up, a few rumpled tablecloths have been smoothed out and decorated with clumps of dried lavender, flowering dill and eucalyptus branches. Red-and-white wine glasses are set on the table, flanked by Mason jars for water.
It’s been a hot day, and by the time the guests start to trickle in, the dining room thermostat reads a sweltering 83 degrees. Andrew Burch, the Supper Club’s sommelier, has toweled off his glistening shaved head and changed his sweat-soaked T-shirt for a marginally dressier plaid button-down.
Noble Swine does “concept” dinners: a Mexican dinner, a vegetarian dinner, an all-tomato dinner; and the Breakfast for Dinner menu, which featured a now-notorious take on chicken and waffles made with a huge slab of guinea hen. Tonight’s dinner is a market menu, eight courses plus a cocktail, five wines, and coffee for $50.The menu features late-summer fruits and vegetables from the farmers market.
The vibe in the kitchen is chatty and casual. The food simmers away on makeshift equipment, camping stoves balanced on narrow counters, a three-tiered plastic steamer from Bed Bath & Beyond that looks like something you’d find at a yard sale. Stubby bottles of beer appear on workspaces after the second course goes out. A call for fresh herbs on a chicken liver dish demands a quick foray through a tenant’s apartment to reach herb boxes behind the restaurant.
Most of the cooks wear street clothes and sneakers. The best-groomed Swiner is the dishwasher, a barista at Crema who works in two-tone wingtips and sports a complicated hairstyle. (“We pay him in high fives and beer,” Van Stee says.)
The first course is a chilled soup made with Rocky Ford melons, garnished with slivers of yellow Peach tomatoes and shavings of pinkish Coppa salami from Il Mondo Vecchio. The dish pulses with color in the bowl, and on the palate, it tingles with farm-freshness. The soup brings out, surprisingly, the melonlike notes in the tomato. (MacGillivray admits that the combination of melons and tomatoes came from California chef David Kinch.)
If I’ve had a better restaurant dish in Denver, I can’t remember what it was.
The chef in me wonders if a few dishes could have been improved by the intercession of a single, authoritative guiding hand. But the batting average is high. Crispy, pungent buttermilk-battered chicken livers with a deeply flavored jam made of heirloom peppers are followed by a moist grilled quail with pickled tomatoes and a sauce made from charred peaches.
In the long wait between the livers and the quail, BlackBerrys, cellphones, and digital cameras are taken out at the dinner tables. A few of the guests wander over to Crema’s coffee nook, which doubles as the plating area, and chat easily with the cooks.
Dessert courses appear. A simple, vibrant dish of Red Heart plums marinated in Meyer lemon juice and sweet basil. A rectangle of zucchini cake garnished with pecan praline and brown butter ice cream. The zucchini cake is super-moist and more deeply flavored than most quick breads: Van Stee has replaced the traditional neutral oil in the recipe with cold-pressed hazelnut oil.
For the Noble Swine Supper Club, this is success—cachet in a small corner of the food world and an opportunity to do the food they want without shortcuts. And enough money to buy equipment and beer and, occasionally, to pay themselves.