Fernandez and Leluu

Underground supperclubs are like a little dip into the unknown. Unlike going to a restaurant, where you roughly know how the experience is going to pan out, going to a supperclub requires taking a big leap of faith. You’re essentially paying complete strangers money to eat a meal in their living room, sitting alongside other complete strangers. What could be weird about that?! Well...they could feed you revolting school dinners, bore you with their stamp collection or lock you in the basement. And much other worse things besides.

Thankfully, nothing like this occurred earlier this week when we visited a supperclub called Fernandez and Leluu, run by charismatic couple Uyen and Simon in their artfully decorated Hackney flat. We ate a generous spread of prettily presented and delicious Vietnamese dishes and chattered away to a very nice couple. M did scary sounding things with helicopters and oil rigs in his day job, and H once owned a wedding dress shop which she sold to a crazy woman who immediately burned it down for the insurance money. It's always fascinating meeting new people and hearing their stories – not something that is always easy to do in London.

This is what we ate:

Wide rice noodles with spicy sausage:



Pork terrine and pork spare ribs –ribs flavoured with (I think) star anise, and an interesting Vietnamese-style terrine that contained egg and glass noodles; much lighter than the traditional French version:



Prawn and squid paste on sugar cane – yummy sugar cane juice squirts out when chewed!



Bun Bo Hue (spicy beef noodle soup) – fragrant and light with pieces of tender beef:



Chicken and lemongrass wrapped in vine leaves, with a citrus and fish sauce dip in shot glasses:



Coconut sorbet – absolutely delicious and light, just the right thing to end the meal:



The only slight thing that went wrong, though, was when I drunkenly wobbled out of the door to go home, and only realised the following morning that I had been wearing someone else’s denim jacket. I tried to wear it to work, and several steps out of my front door I realised it just didn't feel right...d’uh!

The rightful owner of the jacket will be reunited with it soon...meanwhile, my cheaper and vastly inferior denim jacket is being posted back by the lovely Uyen, who says that diners have left large quantities of umbrellas and scarves behind in her home. She probably has a special 'lost property' cupboard. Imagine if one day somebody left behind their wooden leg or glass eye - that's not as weird as it sounds, especially since someone lost their prosthetic leg at a music festival my husband N used to work at - it got handed into The Big Chill's Lost Property!

Fernandez and Leluu supperclub

Saltoun Supper Club

Sometimes I'm lucky enough to stumble upon the occasional hidden away eatery that is truly unique, a little bit under-the-radar, and with an edge of naughtiness. Somewhere with a rebellious spirit and a generous nature. I almost don't want to tell you about this one, but I'm feeling festively generous. And the food is a-mazing. Here it is: The Saltoun Supper Club, one of London's most feted underground restaurants presided over by a gregarious and enigmatic moustachiod cook. You won't be eating in a regular joint where you can book a table to order: there's a phenomenal waiting list, the restaurant only opens on Wednesday and Thursday nights and you'll be eating in Arno Masdoorp's second floor flat in Brixton, South London. Not only will you eat a meal fit for the gods, but you can rummage through his flatmate's book collection and smoke an illicit ciggy out of the skylight!

Arno has been running his supper club from March of 2009. From the moment you ring the doorbell of the unassuming Victorian terrace on Saltoun Road, you feel the thrill of the unknown. You don't know who you'll be sat next to or what the atmosphere will be like. But there's nothing to fear except having fun! He comes to greet every diner personally (there's only room for 14 people), and you sit in his living room which is festooned with curious and ornaments, and every table is beautifully decorated with striking design touches and vintage curios. It's like sitting in a jewel box - there is so much to look at. Arno and his head waiter (usually one of his good friends) are quick to make everyone feel at home and you're told you can roam everywhere you please in the house.

The food is excellent. Ok, so Arno has 20 years of restaurant experience, so you'd sort of expect him to be able to fan a melon, but it's not always a given that just because you've worked in catering that your food is good by default, is it? He cooks with real flair and elegance. The meal on our first visit is etched into my memory: a pre-starter salad of cucumber and feta cheese, a starter of rustic duck pate with caperberries and melba toast, a delicious main course of sea bass with new potatoes and peas, a divine dessert of mango with salted caramel and meringue, and petit fours served on gold platters. It was essential that we return...

Unfortunately this time around I decided to take photos (using my husband's rubbish camera phone). I was trying to be unobtrusive, avoiding snapping away with my bigger camera. But these will at least will give you a rough (and blurry) idea of what we ate...

Baked Beets, Peppers and Tomatoes with Mandarin Oil:


Such a humble looking salad which was an 'umami'-laden mix of savouriness, earthiness and zingy citrussy oil - amazing. And the bread was craggy sourdough from the Wild Caper deli in Brixton Market. Four of us greedily got through THREE baskets of this bread...oops...that's nearly one basket each!

Truffle infused Cauliflower Gnocchi:


This was my first experience of truffles. Our host had combined the truffles two ways: he'd infused them in the gnocchi, and also added perfumed dabs of truffle cream at the edges of the plate. Raw cauliflower was shaved over the top. I don't even usually like cauliflower, but this dish was HEAVEN. I can definitely handle eating cauliflower in this format - every day please...

Grilled Sea Bass with Saffron and Mussel Sauce:


Deliciously light and fresh, the sea bass was served with a fragrant seafood broth infused with saffron and mussels.

Pear Syrup Tart, Bramley Tart Fine and Salted Caramel:


Really buttery pastry, caremelised pears and heavenly salted caramel...I am crazy for the salt-sweet combination of caramel, salt and pears!

Petit Fours:


Wow-ee - how cute is this? A delightful selection of mini chocolate brownies, nougat, Turkish delight, vintage-style candy canes and chocolate toy cars? Heart be still!!!

Between courses, you're encouraged to go upstairs to Arno's flatmate's bedroom and have a cigarette out of the skylight, and you can sit on sofas and rummage through the books that are stacked floor-to-ceiling in artful piles. After dessert, he and his waiter serve up coffee or tea in vintage mis-matched cups and kitsch coffeepots, and then for the diners that linger, he generously cracks open his own wine supply and pops glamorous decanters down on the table. Arno sits and has a chat once the meal has ended, and he keeps on pouring the vino. It's very hard to leave!

You get all this for a very modest suggested 'donation' of £25 per head, which is staggeringly cheap for the superb level of food and number of courses (and it's BYO). Arno told us that he doesn't really make much money from doing the Supper Club two nights a week, but that it acts as the perfect vehicle to spread the word about his catering service. This is clearly a man who is passionate about food and entertaining - it takes guts and a lot of energy to invite strangers into your home and feed them to such a high standard week after week. But you sense that he and his flatmate absolutely thrive on the buzz and theatre of it.

So, if you want to eat fabulous food in fascinating surroundings, meet new people and have an evening that is really different, The Saltoun Supperclub might be the place for you. As we left - or rather wobbled - out of the front door with our friends A and K, they proclaimed that they'd had such an amazing evening that they wanted to 'eat Arno's flat'...

The Saltoun Supperclub
Secret Location, Brixton, South London

The Shed

I had a fairly weird experience last night. I paid money to go and eat a set dinner in a total stranger's house - with other strangers - and we sat and ate in their garden shed. That's right. In a garden shed. Ok, so it was a pretty large one, containing two round tables with checked tablecloth and chairs, a few fairy lights hanging here and there, but it was essentially a large potting shed with windows. Some people might think I'm mad...

'The Shed' is one of London's newish 'underground restaurants': basically, this is where you pay to have dinner in a total stranger's home. You pay a suggested 'donation' and the hosts get to play restaurant in their own home, without having to pay any of the associated overheads. About 10 or so of these underground places have sprung up all over London and many think this has emerged as a sort of 'two fingers' to the recession, and also a desire for diners to have a more homely and intimate experience without the starchiness of a posh restaurant. It's all organised through social networking sites such as Facebook, and news is also spread by word of mouth.

So why go? The plus sides are that you meet new people who you would never normally bump into and are encouraged to socialise, you get to nose around a total stranger's house (bliss for me since I'm VERY nosy) and you get to spend an evening doing something a little bit different. The downsides? You never know what you're going to get, or whether your hosts can cook for toffee! And you might get stuck sat next to a dullard. But we were excited since we'd had an excellent experience at The Saltoun Road Supperclub in Brixton (I'd recommend this place to anyone) and hoped for something equally fun and delicious at The Shed.

So, last night we trekked to the Newington Green area of East London and pressed the doorbell of a mysterious garden flat. A rather stressed young man answered the door and ushered us indoors, passing through a very narrow and messy kitchen, where his girlfriend was bent over making lots of meat skewers with a worried expression on her face. Oh dear - this was a sign of things to come, unfortunately. We were shown through a rather gloomy dark back garden to the aforementioned shed. We sat down with four other people and luckily conversation immediately sparked up. We cracked into our wine (it's BYO, of course) and waited for the food. And waited. And waited some more. Then the couple arrived looking incredibly harassed, all the while apologising as they set down some Malaysian chicken sate kebabs on the table. We assured them that we were having a fine old time and not to worry, since we were pretty drunk and chatting away furiously with our new-found friends.

The starters were cleared, with more apologising for things being late. After an hour, the main course arrived (a tasty beef rendang with egg fried rice), again with the same over-apologetic flourishes.

'We so very sorry this is late. Really really sorry. This isn't going how we wanted it to go...really sorry...'
'Seriously it's no problem - we're having lots of fun.'
'Sorry, though, it's unacceptable that you're having to wait so long. Really sorry...'
And so on.

I felt gloomy just watching these poor people (who seemed very nice) go about racked with stress and uber-apologising. It was almost cringeworthy. We all wanted them to stop apologising - chances are, had they just done it once to be polite, we wouldn't have noticed the food taking ages afterwards. Why on earth were they doing this? Feeding strangers in their home with a dodgy oven and grill that was on the blink, not to mention doing full time jobs? Plus, they'd cooked four massive dinner parties in their shed in the past 10 days. They looked as though they were on the brink of exhaustion.



Anyway. The food was fairly good, thankfully. We had chicken sate skewers to start, beef rendang curry and egg-fried rice for main course and a delicious mango fool accompanied with banana bread for dessert. All the plates were cleared, and people were happy with the food. But I really felt awful for the hosts, who seemed totally wrung out by the end of the evening. They said they wouldn't take the standard £16-per-head charge and instead would discount the meal to £10. I couldn't bear to do that, so paid full whack anyway. They'd suffered enough! But because they didn't enjoy themselves, I couldn't really see myself returning again. They certainly cooked fairly well, but the surroundings were a bit glum. (I was also a bit horrified by the skanky bathroom). One of the things I enjoyed so much about The Saltoun Road Supperclub was that the host (Arno) seemed to be having as much of a laugh as his guests. So I haven't been put off - I definitely will be trying out another supperclub soon - it's a totally unique experience. Plus think of the future dinner party anecdotes worth their weight in gold!

Anyone else out there been to any 'underground' supperclubs in the UK or abroad? I'd love to hear about your experiences, good and bad!