The chef behind Philly’s hottest supper club plans to open a restaurant

When Liz Grothe cooked for a few friends at her Northern Liberties apartment in 2022, she didn’t know it would be the start of Philly’s favorite supper club.

Now, whenever Grothe, 29, posts to her Instagram a new menu for a themed dinner at Couch Cafe, strangers race to get a reservation (typically, gone within minutes) for a seat in the chef’s living room. But soon, Grothe is looking to move Couch Cafe out of her home — and into her own restaurant, which she hopes to open this fall or winter.

It feels like a natural next step for Grothe, who has taken her whimsical dinner party on the road with pop-ups around the city in recent weeks.

Although she doesn’t have a restaurant space yet, Grothe says she’s found a promising contender and hopes it will seat a minimum of 24 and maximum of 32 diners. For now, she’s working on securing financing to cover the rent.

In the meantime, the Oklahoma-raised chef has found a temporary home for Couch Cafe with a residency at Forin’s Frankford Ave. location every Thursday through Saturday starting March 1 through May 25 that she’ll use to “test run” a restaurant. She’s also taking Couch Cafe to Lacroix, where she’ll collaborate with chef Eric Leveillee on February 25.

As a new pet owner, Grothe tells me it’s become necessary to move Couch Cafe out of her apartment. (“That’s my couch!” the chef says during our call, chiding her cat, Heavy Cream, for scratching the sofa.) She has also dreamed of opening a restaurant after years spent working in food, with turns as an industrial safety manager at a cheesesteak factory, a steward at River Twice, cook at Oloroso, and sous chef at Fiorella, where she learned the art of pasta-making.

Pasta has become a hallmark of Couch Cafe, where Grothe has dedicated dinners to cities like Florence and Rome inspired by her travels. (To this day, I still think about the tortellini en brodo served at her Bologna dinner: tiny, tender parcels of pork and Parmigiano-Reggiano dropped in silky chicken broth.)

“Being a woman of color doing her take on Italian food” — and doing it “really well” — is what sets Grothe, a Filipina chef, apart from other chefs with supper clubs in Philly, Ashley Huston of Dreamworld Bakes says.

But pasta isn’t all Grothe can do, and she wants to make that clear at her upcoming restaurant, Scampi. Don’t be fooled by the name — while you can expect some Italian food, Grothe says Scampi won’t be an Italian restaurant.

Scampi’s focus will be “the new, all-American cuisine,” with themed menus ranging from the Philippines to the U.S. South. It’s an approach that would let Grothe stay nimble and create dinner-party experiences influenced by her passion for food history, as she’s done with Couch Cafe.

So, why Scampi? “It’s an homage to what American food is now,” Grothe says. “Shrimp scampi is a little bit of a ridiculous and misguided thing we’ve done,” she adds, pointing to how scampi isn’t really a shrimp dish, as it’s become known in the U.S.; it’s actually a langoustine indigenous to Europe. But when Italians moved to English-speaking areas, Grothe says — giving me a mini food-history lesson like the ones she shares between courses at Couch Cafe — “things got lost in translation.”

Grothe’s food-history anecdotes are part of her charm, Oloroso’s executive chef Jason Peabody tells me. “Say Liz was behind the curtains and you didn’t see her and you didn’t talk to her,” he says, the food “would be good. But when she comes out and then kind of takes the experience over the top, that makes it great.” He says it’s why he goes to Couch Cafe.

The experience Grothe creates for diners is key to her culinary style, perhaps best described by her former River Twice colleague Kevin McWilliams (now at Laurel) as “uniquely Liz.” For Grothe, who grew up visiting fast casual restaurants and dining family-style with her Chinese relatives, the occasion of eating with people is as important as the food. “It was always about being with people that were really fun,” she says.

Fun has become the chef’s trademark. Her appeal lies in her playful approach to making seriously good food, often by mixing elements of high and lowbrow cuisine. At her recent Western Sizzlin’ pop-up at High Street, there was country-fried steak and a salad bar. And at Couch Cafe, she leaves cans of Miller High Life strewn around for diners to find.

“Being goofy, I think, is definitely her mantra,” Little Fish chef Jacob Trinh says. When the two collaborated at Couch Cafe, Trinh remembers how he and Grothe leaned into their humor to get through a seating without power, serving dishes by candle and iPhone light.

“Liz has done a very unique thing that not a lot of people are doing, creating such an intimate and wonderful dining experience,” Jake Loeffler, a chef-owner at Paffuto, tells me. Almost everyone I speak to who has worked with Grothe uses the word “unique” when talking about her. She has “that thing that people have that’s indescribable,” McWilliams says, where you know “they’re gonna do something great.”

For Grothe, it’s looking like Scampi could be that next “something great.” Still, her challenge with opening a restaurant will be making Couch Cafe — a nontraditional restaurant experience — work within the confines of one. “I’m excited to see how she does it,” Lacroix’s Leveillee says, pointing to how Amanda Shulman made Her Place Supper Club successful; if Shulman can do it, Grothe can too.

The chef has her own playbook for Scampi, where she plans to adopt a similar model to Couch Cafe by taking prepaid reservations for themed dinners and hopes to give back to the Philly community by supporting other cooks.

Grothe’s former colleague Andrew Mattis, a complex manager at Tyson Foods, says he has “no doubt that she is going to succeed.” He points to how far she’s come since moving from Kansas (where she worked a safety job) to Philly at 23. “She came from the Midwest into the big city and she was pretty young at the time,” Mattis says. “Now she’s really a part of it and it’s a part of her.”

With Scampi on the horizon, it looks like Couch Cafe is just the beginning for Grothe.

As for the supper club — that is, as it exists at Grothe’s apartment — the chef expects it to “revert back to its old self,” an invite-only dinner party for close friends. And Heavy Cream, of course.