The secret supper clubs at the heart of the Philly dining scene

One of the best dining experiences in Philly materializes for a single night only, on a side street past the buzzy bars and established restaurants of Northern Liberties, in Liz Grothe’s living room. She calls it Couch Cafe.

Normally, Grothe, 28, works as a sous chef at Fiorella, Marc Vetri’s much-acclaimed pasta bar in the Italian Market. But once a month, on her day off, Grothe arranges the tables and chairs jigsaw-like in her open-concept apartment and cooks exactly whatever she wants for a dozen friends and strangers. She posts the menu in advance on Instagram and people prepay via Venmo.

“I don’t have enough friends to have a monthly dinner party where everybody helps me pay for groceries,” Grothe joked. “So that’s why I had to sell tickets.”

At the end of May, Grothe hosted a dinner called “Spaghetti Western,” which involved making four types of pasta from scratch, smoking 7 pounds of crawfish on her back porch, and whipping through three dozen eggs for lemon soufflés. In between the night’s two seatings, Grothe’s roommate darted out from his room to retrieve the cat.

Informal supper clubs like this one are some of the most imaginative places to eat in Philly right now. Operating out of chefs’ apartments and advertised on social media, they allow rising stars like Grothe to design and cook their own sometimes outlandish concepts. (The vibe is very much Sydney Adamu, the young, brilliant sous chef on The Bear, hosting a seven-course meal at her apartment).

Existing in the blurry space between dinner party and restaurant, supper clubs also cultivate a kind of priceless exclusivity: It’s informal, but if you don’t know the cool kids, you’d never know to go.

“People are like, ‘I don’t quite know how to explain it, but we went to a dinner party in someone’s apartment,’” said Daniel Solway, a sommelier who runs a supper club called Santé out of his apartment in the Italian Market.

By the midpoint of the Spaghetti Western dinner — seven courses for which guests paid a flat $65 — Grothe’s Birkenstocks were soaking wet and she was operating all four burners at once. Her boyfriend, Jake Lante, until recently a sous chef at the tapas and sherry bar Oloroso, was furiously washing stacks of dishes in the regular-size kitchen sink. (Lante, 30, has celiac disease; his devotion to Grothe’s pasta-themed meal was rooted in love).

In addition to Lante, Grothe had hired a Fiorella colleague, Elizabeth Sloane, to run “front of house” operations. Sloane had designed three cocktails, including one featuring arugula amaro, to match the evening’s theme. On her day off, she appreciated that she could play with ingredients that would be hard to scale for a large restaurant, like a garnish of cherry tomatoes rolled in habanero jelly.

The guests were thrilled. Around the living room, they chatted happily, helping themselves to communal plates of spicy sthridhlja, a type of hand-pulled noodle, and brothy crab tortellini. Some had worked with Grothe in the restaurant industry; others were dedicated foodies used to scouring the city (and Instagram) for new dishes.

“Would die for the salad. Would die for the lemon wedge,” said Maddie Zelicoff, 33, seated by the window with a friend. “There’s something about the level of care and comfort that’s very enticing.”

Grothe has always cooked for people. When she was little, her mother, who is Filipino, would set her up with elaborate tasks in the kitchen while her brothers went to wrestling tournaments. Sometimes that meant cleaning and pulling the heads off 10 pounds of fresh shrimp for a seafood feast, or rolling hundreds of lumpia to freeze for future parties.

After college Grothe got a job as an industrial safety manager at Tyson, a high-pressure job that boiled down to “telling grown men, ‘Hey, guys, please do not stick your fingers into those moving plates,’” she said.

But she missed cooking, and when the pandemic hit, she no longer wanted to be responsible for the safety of hundreds of workers. She began washing dishes at River Twice and worked her way up cooking at Oloroso.

Though she soaked up the skills of a restaurant kitchen, Grothe found the culture at Oloroso stultifying.

“I really needed an outlet to cook and it’d be fun again,” Grothe said. As a humanities major, she had learned that every great artistic movement is a reaction to another. So she started Couch Cafe.

It’s hard to know how many supper clubs like hers have popped up in living rooms and kitchens across the city, because they operate under the radar.

Solway, the sommelier, has run Santé out of his apartment in the Italian Market since 2020, collaborating with different chefs for weekly 25-person dinners. In the beginning he transformed his home into a semi-restaurant by hiding extra furniture with hanging bedsheets, borrowing folding chairs from his dad’s house in Mount Airy, and buying secondhand dishware at Philly AIDS Thrift. The menus were printed at Staples.

“We weren’t trying to hide the fact that it was an apartment,” Solway, 31, said. The spirit was “cobbled together, hodgepodge.”

Now he runs Santé full-time, hosting private events as well as dinners at his apartment.

A five-course meal at Santé runs $75, plus $35-$40 for beverage pairings.

Philly has a long history of semisecret, semi-legal, much-beloved supper clubs. Amanda Shulman, the chef behind Her Place Supper Club, got her start cooking five-course meals in her West Philly apartment when she was a Penn undergraduate, posting a menu on Facebook and charging $35. Her Place, named the best restaurant of 2022 by The Inquirer’s Craig LaBan, prides itself on being “kind of like a restaurant but kind of like a dinner party.”

Other supper clubs are run by enthusiastic home cooks without formal restaurant training.

By day, Aaron Davis, 27, works as a data analyst. But by night, roughly every other month, Davis hosts a 12-person supper club at his apartment, featuring food from the northern coast of Peru, where his mother was born. He calls it Boy Supper Club, typically offering a sliding scale between $35-$50. The dinners are intimate and labor-intensive: Davis grows the peppers and herbs himself and begins each meal with a caldo, a traditional chicken broth that takes hours to make.

That kind of care is essential to the supper club culture. At Couch Cafe, as the Spaghetti Western plates were cleared, Grothe called the room to attention.

“Our phones died so we can’t stream music anymore!” she said, thanking everyone for coming.

“You guys can hang out for a bit longer, but don’t stay too long,” she said, “because I have to go to sleep and go to work tomorrow.” In her living room, all the customers clapped.