The Girls' Guide to Love and Supper Clubs (11 page)

“I don’t know …”

But we both know I’m warming up to the idea. The investment and risk of holding a stand-alone dinner are minimal, and since I’d be doing it on the side and in secret, I could save the one-hour lecture from my parents about how I’m throwing away my future.

There is, however, the minor issue of my living space: an efficiency apartment with no furniture and enough plates and cutlery for precisely one guest. Rachel assures me these are obstacles we can work around.

“Besides, your apartment is underground. How perfect is that? An underground restaurant that is, in fact, underground.”

“It is tempting …”

“Oh, come on, you should do it. This can be for you what Milk Glass is for me—your creative outlet. Trust me, you won’t regret it. And I’ll help.” She smiles and raises her eyebrows. “Say yes. You know you want to.”

I consider it. What do I have to lose? My boyfriend already dumped me, and I am stuck in a job I increasingly hate. And my landlord is away a bunch of weekends this fall, so I could hold the dinners while he is away and not have to worry about bothering him with the noise. If ever there was a time to give the whole supper club thing a try, this is it.

I look at Rachel, who is still smiling and has begun twiddling her fingers excitedly. I bite my lip and take a deep breath.

“What the hell,” I say. “Let’s do it.”

In what is perhaps an indication of how pathetically boring my life is at the moment, I haven’t been able to think about anything—
anything
—but this underground supper club since Rachel and I talked on Tuesday. We’ve e-mailed back and forth all week about dates and menus and guest lists while my brain has spun like a pinwheel, dreaming up appetizers and entrées and swanky cocktails. Each correspondence between Rachel and me has used the code word “DCSC,” in reference to The Dupont Circle Supper Club, the tentative name for our underground venture. I’m sure much of the allure of putting on this event stems from how unadventurous I usually am, and thus organizing something secretive—with code words and undisclosed locations—feels really badass, which probably only demonstrates how badass we are not. By charging money for a meal without the DC health department’s stamp of approval, we are also possibly doing something illegal, which only adds to the air of mystery and intrigue.

After a week of planning, we decide to launch The Dupont Circle Supper Club next Saturday, the third weekend in September and the first weekend my landlord is back in Tampa for a series of town hall meetings. Rachel creates a Facebook page called The Dupont Circle Supper Club, which bears little information other than a teaser about Saturday night’s dinner:

Unique dining experience awaits adventurous eaters with interest in creative cooking and stimulating conversation. Twelve diners will meet at a secret location on Sat. 9/19 at 8:00. Five-course meal, $45 sugg. donation. Get in touch to reserve your spot now!

While Rachel handles the logistics, I promise to spend the rest of the week firming up the menu, which, as far as I’m concerned, is the most important part. Who cares if a supper club is secretive and fun if the food isn’t any good?

On Friday, I rush home after work, foregoing the usual after-work happy hour with my coworkers, and plop down on my air mattress with a glass of wine and my laptop. I have one week to nail down all of the details, which means it’s officially crunch time.

I grab three of my favorite cookbooks—Julia Child’s
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
, Marcella Hazan’s
Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking
, and Alice Waters’s
The Art of Simple Food
—along with my four-inch stack of archived loose recipes from
Gourmet, Bon Appetit
, and
Food & Wine
. Tonight I want to nail down the main course, so that I can build the rest of the meal around it. I need something special, something spectacular. I want to blow people’s minds—or, at the very least, convince them they got their money’s worth.

As I dog-ear pages and jot down menu notes on my computer, I hear a loud crashing sound outside my front door, followed by a thumping down my front steps. I freeze.

I tiptoe toward the front door and peer through the peephole, where I see Rachel, dripping in sweat, lugging a large folding table down my stairway from the sidewalk above.

“What the hell is this?” I say, leaning against my doorframe.

Rachel pauses and wipes her forehead with the back of her hand. “A table,” she says, panting.

“I can see that. Where’d it come from?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

I narrow my eyes. “What does that mean?”

“It means I took care of it. We have a table for the party. And there’s another one on the way. That’s all you need to know.” She grins as I spot the IRD logo at the bottom of the table.

“I’m sorry, do I know you? Since when do you steal furniture?”

Rachel rests her hand on her hip. “Do you want the table or not?”

I roll my eyes. “Like I have a choice. Come in.”

Rachel wrestles the table into my apartment, and I shake my head as she nearly bashes through my wall. Her wily antics should come as no surprise. This, I have learned, is how Rachel Cohen operates. She’s a Chicago girl through and through. If she wants to make something happen, it will happen, and god help anyone who stands in her way. You want a table? She’ll get you a table. Just don’t question her methods. She possesses an unexpected mix of refined elegance and gutsy determination, a powerful combination that will likely result in her taking over the world someday. I, on the other hand, will be lucky if I take over my own life. I talk a good game, but backing up words with action isn’t usually my forte.

I watch as Rachel gently leans the table against the far wall. “Dare I ask about chairs?”

“I’ve taken care of that, too,” she says. “I’ll have them to you by Monday.”

“Who are you, Tony Soprano?”

“What? No. You know I’d never wear a tracksuit.” She places her hands on her hips and surveys the piles of clothes encircling my air mattress, which altogether takes up most of the space in my tiny studio apartment. “You’ll have to do something about this mess.”

“Relax—the air mattress deflates. I’ll just shove the clothes in my closet.”

“Is that your long-term storage solution? Leaving your clothes in piles around your bed?”

I shrug. “I’ve been busy.”

Rachel arches her eyebrows. “There’s always time to work functional aesthetics into our daily lives.”

“Thanks, Martha.”

A labored sigh. “
Anyway
, I got another reservation request today. We’re up to eleven. We’ll definitely be able to get one more person by next Saturday.”

Rachel, the social media junkie, has been recruiting guests using Twitter, Facebook, and whatever social media tool she is into at the moment. How she managed to amass eleven guests in one week is beyond me, but I’m guessing it has something to do with her three thousand friends on Facebook and five thousand followers on Twitter. That, and the fact that she undoubtedly oversold my cooking experience.

“Well, gotta run,” she says. “I have forty-five minutes to shower and change before I’m supposed to meet my date at Cork.”

“Your date, huh? Anyone I know?”

She bites her lip. “Don’t think so.”

“There’s a new person every week. I can’t keep track.”

“What would be the point?”

That pretty much sums up Rachel’s position on men and dating. When she was twelve, she walked in on her father, a nephrologist, kissing his research nurse, and from what I gather, she now views relationships and monogamy through a highly skeptical lens. There is always a man in her life, but she never keeps him around for very long because, she says, eventually he’ll leave her for someone else anyway. She always says this as if she is entirely comfortable with the disposable nature of the men in her life, but I know there is more pain beneath the surface than she cares to admit.

“By the way, any thoughts on the menu?” she asks.

“A few. I haven’t made any decisions, though. Maybe a slow-roasted pork shoulder?”

Rachel grimaces. “You can’t serve pork.”

“Why not?”

She gently raises an eyebrow. “Uh, because it’s Rosh Hashanah? What kind of Jew are you?”

Apparently, a very bad one. “Wait … next weekend is Rosh Hashanah?”

She laughs. “Why do you think Congress is in recess? Duh.”

“Well … whatever. It’s not like I keep kosher. Neither do you, for that matter.”

“Hey, just because I’m not flying back to Chicago for the Rosh doesn’t mean I’m okay with serving pork on one of the holiest Jewish holidays. It just feels … wrong.”

I sigh. “Fine. I’ll come up with something else. Maybe I could work Rosh Hashanah into the theme—resurrect some of my bubbe’s old recipes, explain the symbolism and history of the food.”

Rachel brightens. “That sounds like a great idea, actually. It gives the dinner a hook.”

And it is becoming abundantly clear a hook is definitely something we need. In all the excitement of planning an underground supper club, Rachel and I may have overlooked one minor detail—a teensy little factoid, really—and that is the fact that I have no official cooking credentials whatsoever. Sure, I like to cook, and I’d like to think I’m quite good at it, but I am not a professional chef and, as it stands, I do not own my own catering company. I did enroll in a part-time cooking class after I graduated from Cornell, which I took in secret while I waited tables and lived at home, but that is the closest I’ve come to being a professional cook. I’ve never had to run my own kitchen, nor have I cooked for payment, which means Rachel and I need to forestall a possible riot when people realize they’ve paid forty-five dollars to eat in a cramped basement apartment.

“Call me tomorrow,” she says, giving me a quick hug. “We can discuss the details.”

I lock the door behind her and scurry back to my computer, suddenly excited by the prospect of a unifying theme. My bubbe’s holiday dinners were legendary, the tables overflowing with platters of brisket and tzimmes, stuffed cabbage and potato knishes, blintzes and kugel and fat loaves of challah. Ever since she died eight years ago, our holiday celebrations have splintered into quiet, nuclear affairs, and this year, with my parents in London, we aren’t even getting together. But I miss her cooking, the way her tender brisket melted on the tongue, the way her stuffed cabbage hugged the fragrant beef filling tightly and always tasted both a little sweet and a little sour. Cooking was an act of love, a way of providing for her family. She always said she saw a lot of herself in me.

I glance at my computer screen and begin jotting down notes in a new blank document:

Brisket/tzimmes

Stuffed cabbage (mini)

Potato/apple tart?

Apple cider challah—honey!

Apple cake? Honey cake? Both?

As I dream up more ideas—potato and celery root kugel! chopped liver toasts! Hungarian walnut torte!—my cell phone rings. My parents. The second time this week. This can’t be good.

“Mom? What’s up? Is everything okay?”

“It’s your father.”

“Oh, sorry, Dad. What’s wrong?”

“What do you mean, ‘What’s wrong’? Can’t a man call his only child every once in a while?”

I picture my dad’s face as he says this—his lip curling up at the side, rumpling his fuzzy, bearded jowls. When I was a baby, I used to love grabbing his beard with my little fists, rocking his head from side to side as I screamed with delight. He shaved it once when I was in high school, but my mom and I begged him to grow it back; I told him he looked as if he didn’t have any lips, and my mom said she felt as if she were kissing a stranger. He hasn’t messed with it since, even though gray hairs seem to be taking it over like crabgrass.

“Isn’t it after midnight in London?” I ask.

“You know me—always the night owl. And besides, I wanted to talk to my daughter. So sue me.”

“You can give a call whenever you want,” I say. “It’s always good to hear your voice.”

It is always good to hear his voice. That said, given that my mom called three days ago, I am not convinced this call is without an agenda. Before the last call, I hadn’t spoken to my parents on the phone in two weeks, and with all their work-related travel, that’s about how often I’ve spoken to them for the past two years. As professors who study the economies of Brazil, Russia, India, and China (so-called BRICs specialists), they’re always flying to some exotic place, and their travel has become more frequent in recent years. Our main form of communication is e-mail, which usually involves my parents sending me updates on their travel and links to articles or papers they think I should read. We e-mail every few days and occasionally Skype, but when they travel, calling tends to be a twice-a-month affair. Why the sudden urgency?

“I heard about Adam,” my dad says. “What a shame. He seemed like a nice guy.” Unlike my mom, my dad admired Adam, though he never expressed his thoughts in any detail in front of my mother.

“Yeah, well, live and learn.”

“True, true, kiddo.” He pauses. “Listen, Mom and I were wondering—well, it came up in the context of that Princeton fellowship and some other issues we were discussing. Are you planning to take the GRE exam this fall?”