Picture this: You’re standing in the parking lot of what looks from the front like a beauty supply store, surrounded by 15 strangers. You’re ushered inside, seated at a table laid out with handmade ceramics, and served a meal made with fresh, seasonal ingredients. By the end of the night, you leave full and happy and, hopefully, with 14 new friends.
That’s the goal at Mug of the Month Club, a supper club led by chef Zach Meloy, who serves as both chef and ceramicist, sending each guest home with a unique mug at the end of the meal.
Though he’s proud of both the food and ceramics, Meloy’s primary goal for Mug of the Month is to create community, a sentiment echoed by other chefs who operate similar dinners around Atlanta.
“I joke around when I say this, but it’s not really a joke: The ceramics and the dinner are almost the bait to get people to come in. What I feel like I’m trying to create is a dialogue amongst strangers,” he said. “I feel like we no longer interact with people we don’t know anymore.”
Here, six supper clubs around metro Atlanta that seek to fill both your belly and your soul.
Credit: Courtesy of Bovino After Dark
Credit: Courtesy of Bovino After Dark
Bovino After Dark
Nestled behind a counter at Hop City Craft Beer and Wine in the Lee + White development in Atlanta’s West End neighborhood, Bovino After Dark (instagram.com/bovinoafterdark) is a supper club that thrives on constant evolution.
“We’re not going to do food you’ve had before,” said Alex Sher, the self-described maitre d’ who runs the operation with executive chef Chris McCord, formerly of Glenwood Park restaurant Gunshow and the creator of the brand Salt Your Food. “We’re just going to do incredibly weird and creative food that’s also comforting and tastes good.”
That means five-course, omakase-style dinners that offer up dishes like horseradish panna cotta with peanut and pho broth and McCord’s take on PF Chang’s lettuce wraps with pork floss and caramel sauce, along with additional add-ons like $10 caviar bumps and drinks from Hop City.
Ingredients are largely sourced from the 6,000-acre farming co-op Hero Farms in Dublin, Georgia, which also sells produce to more than 140 restaurants in the metro Atlanta area. Products from the farm will also be available soon under the name Hero Bovino via a focused community-supported agriculture (CSA) program operating out of walk-in coolers in the same space. Also under the Hero umbrella are a USDA meat processing business and the wholesale operation Stone Mountain Cattle.
Sher, who previously worked as a bartender and bar manager for local bars and restaurants including Proof & Provision and Two Urban Licks, said preparations begin on Tuesdays for dinners starting Fridays and running through Sundays.
Sticking to a hyperlocal and hyperseasonal menu with a focus on creating as little waste as possible, Bovino After Dark serves as a chance “for us to give back to Georgia agriculture and for us to have fun again. A lot of chefs are stuck cooking an executive chef’s menu, with no creative input. This is not that place.”
So while the menu is mostly conceived by McCord, sous chefs Autumn Jade Feldman, Tyler Oliver and Leudmilla Breland get to provide input and own different portions of the menu.
Though Sher said he and McCord are content to continue to operate Bovino After Dark at Hop City’s 14-seat counter, they’re planning to expand their offerings within the confines of the space, including serving a “polar” dinner in the walk-in coolers and collaborating with other food programs, as well as adding Bovino seatings on Thursday nights and a brunch seating on Sundays.
“We don’t want to grow too much bigger,” he said. “We want our time back ... while also doing the things we love.”
Credit: Courtesy of Chow Club
Credit: Courtesy of Chow Club
Chow Club
The seeds for Chow Club were planted in 2016, when Amanda Plumb asked Yohana Solomon, a native of Ethiopia, for her recommendations on the best place to find food from her home country in Atlanta. “My house,” Solomon shot back.
Plumb, who met Solomon while the latter was operating Atlanta Underground Market, a monthly pop-up that showcased food from immigrant chefs, invited her to cook an Ethiopian feast for her friends.
“Everyone loved that everything looked pretty and tasted great, but she also explained everything,” Plumb said. “Ethiopian food can be intimidating if you’ve never had it, and she made it easy.”
The dinner was the unofficial start of Chow Club (chowclubatlanta.com), the monthly supper club that launched in 2017, and, until recently, operated out of Plumb’s home in East Atlanta. The goal of Chow Club is two-fold: give guests the opportunity to try home-cooked food from around the world from a chef who explains everything in detail, while also giving chefs, many immigrants, the chance to practice cooking for groups of people while introducing their food to new audiences.
“One of the biggest hurdles for anyone starting a business is finding an audience,” said Solomon, a caterer by trade. “We have 14,000 members on our email list, so for someone who is just starting out, this is a beautiful way of doing it. It has that leverage for somebody who’s testing the market.” Solomon and Plumb also coach the chefs on portions and plating, give feedback on the menu and help with photography and marketing.
Many Chow Club chefs go on to open their own restaurants, pop-ups and catering businesses, while some just do it as a side gig and a way of introducing people to the food they love.
Credit: Courtesy of Chow Club
Credit: Courtesy of Chow Club
“Chow Club is a platform for people to tell their stories,” Solomon said. “It goes beyond food. As an immigrant myself, I can say someone else is always telling your story.”
Most of Chow Club’s dinners feature international chefs — recent offerings include food from the Indian state of Tripura, as well as Jamaican and Colombian cuisines — but several events have highlighted local flavors, with dishes from Puerto Rico and the Gullah-Geechee highlighted over the past few months.
Earlier this year, the pair got the chance to move and expand their operation in a space dubbed the Uptown Test Kitchen.
Located in the revamped Uptown Atlanta development (formerly known as Lindbergh City Center), Uptown Test Kitchen serves as the new home base for Chow Club, as well as a concept called Chow À La Carte, which allows a list of chefs from a variety of backgrounds — many of them previous Chow Club chefs — to sell their food outside of the supper club.
“We just want to be a little bit of people’s journeys to becoming chefs,” Plumb said. “We don’t claim to have made anyone famous or changed anyone’s life, but I think it gives them a sense of confidence and a safe place to try.”
Credit: Courtesy of Demetrius Brown
Credit: Courtesy of Demetrius Brown
Heritage Supper Club
Like many great recent food projects, chef Demetrius Brown’s supper club was borne out of the pandemic.
“During lockdown, I was bored out of my mind,” said Brown, who has worked in the kitchen of several Atlanta restaurants including the Hill at Serenbe. “I started cooking a lot more at home, and especially Caribbean food, which I grew up eating a lot of.”
As he became more familiar with the food of his ancestors, he felt inspired to bring the cuisines to a wider audience in unexpected settings.
“You usually find Trinidadian, Jamaican and African food in strip malls and food stalls,” he said. “I wanted to bring it to more of a fine dining culture. I thought it was a shame that the food of mostly Black people was so marginalized compared to other cuisines.”
In 2021, he launched Heritage Supper Club (heritagesupperclub.com), as a pop-up serving food from the African diaspora, then as a seated dinner at venues including Georgia Boy, Condesa Coffee and Bread & Butterfly. He purchased Bread & Butterfly in Inman Park several months ago with business partner Brandon Blanchard, and, along with revamping the restaurant’s dinner menu to feature dishes from African countries influenced by France like Haiti and Senegal, has pegged it as the home base for the supper club.
Credit: Courtesy of Heritage Supper Club
Credit: Courtesy of Heritage Supper Club
Dinners, which he hosts about four times a year, see dishes like Haitian patties and calabaza squash with crispy pork, coriander, sherry and Tajin spice served alongside a soundtrack of songs from the regions being represented.
“I love music, and it plays a huge part in the food,” he said. “I decide what region I want to highlight, and then I’ll listen to a lot of music from that place, and that drives the dishes and the direction of the menu.”
A recent dinner with a hip-hop soundtrack paired Lil Uzi Vert’s “Black Seminole” with the traditional Black dish pepper pot served with Navajo fry bread. As each dish is served, Brown tells guests about the history of the dish, the region it comes from, and why the music was chosen.
While Brown’s primary focus right now is Bread & Butterfly, he has plans to open Heritage Supper Club as a brick-and-mortar in the coming months.
“I started this as a way to pay homage to my great-grandmother, who taught me so much about food, and life in general,” he said. “To turn my back on that seems irresponsible and disrespectful to her legacy. ... Heritage turned me into the chef I am today.”
Credit: Courtesy of Maria
Credit: Courtesy of Maria
Maria
Trevor Shankman might only be 21, but he has plenty of experience cooking for groups of people. As a teenager, he helped launch the Speak Easy Supper Club with his father, chef Kyle Shankman, but stepped away a few years ago to pursue other interests.
Earlier this year, he returned to his love of cooking for others with Maria (mariaatl.info), an intimate BYOB supper club that pays tribute to his grandmother, a Cuban immigrant who died last year and greatly influenced Shankman.
The eight to nine-course Maria dinners, which occur several times throughout the month and sometimes sell out in a matter of hours, are hosted at his grandmother’s house in Kennesaw. Menus, are primarily modern American and “agnostic to format or form with respect to staying central to a certain style of cooking,” Shankman said.
Dishes often pull in elements French and Japanese cooking, as well as Cuban cuisine and dishes Maria cooked for Shankman when he was a child. Dishes have included pork with nectarine, fennel bulb, vadouvan and lavender and bittersweet cocoa, Meyer lemon, olive oil and picholine olive.
Credit: Courtesy of Maria
Credit: Courtesy of Maria
Offerings are based on the availability of ingredients, most of which he sources from local purveyors, and change multiple times a month to keep Shankman engaged and also to provide variety for his guests, many of whom come back multiple times.
“I like to iterate, and see where things can be improved,” he said. “I always come out of the evening with a whole slew of things I could have done better, and I just bake that into the next experience.”
One dish that makes it onto the menu is coconut flan, a favorite of Maria’s from her own childhood, though Shankman presents a different version at each dinner.
With Maria in its beginning stages, Shankman has no plans to expand it. In fact, he said, part of what’s special about the supper club is its size.
“The exclusivity is very important to me. I’m keeping it intentionally small and private. It’s an intimate experience to me, and I try to pass that on to the guest as well. I try to build a relationship with every guest who walks in the door.”
The small dinners also give Shankman an opportunity to fully channel the spirit of his biggest supporter.
“Before my grandmother died, she told me not to let my talents go to waste,” he said. “She was a very brash and honest person. I think she’d be very proud.”
Credit: Courtesy of Zach Meloy
Credit: Courtesy of Zach Meloy
Mug of the Month Club
Two years before the start of the pandemic, chef Zach Meloy’s life changed in two major ways: He closed his Home Park restaurant Better Half after five years, and he accepted a job that necessitated a move to the suburbs.
Though the closure and the move signaled the end of a chapter for Meloy, it also provided him the opportunity to try something new. Meloy, who studied ceramics in college decided to put more time and energy into what had been put to the side as a hobby.
During the pandemic, he set up a mini-studio in his garage, where he turned bowls, mugs and plates while contemplating his next move. “The pandemic laid bare all of the glaring issues with the restaurant industry,” he said. “I decided to move in a different direction.”
Earlier this year, Meloy launched Mug of the Month Club (dirtchurchservices.com/ceramics/p/mug-of-the-month), a monthly supper club that sees him prepare a six-course meal that he serves on the dinnerware he creates under the name Dirt Church Ceramics.
Hosted in a former beauty supply store on Atlanta’s Westside, the dinners feature a new menu every season, using ingredients grown by Meloy, or what he sources from local farmers markets.
Credit: Courtesy of Zach Meloy
Credit: Courtesy of Zach Meloy
In addition to the ceramics Meloy creates to complement each menu (a recent dish made with chicken sausage was served on dishes with imprints of chicken feet), each guest also goes home with a mug. The style of the mugs stays the same but the glazes are unique to the season, making them collector’s items.
“The menu is written based on the ceramics I want to produce or vice versa,” he said. “It’s meant to be a full connection. A complete circle. It’s been a study of the overlap between the two art forms.”
Meloy, who earned his dinner club bonafides more than a decade ago with PushStart Kitchen dinner clubs held at the Goat Farm around Atlanta, enjoys the human element of his dinners just as much as creating the ceramics and preparing the food. “I joke that I’ve been studying small talk for the past 12 years,” he said.
The 16-seat events start with a 30-minute reception with snacks and cocktails, followed by dinner with cocktail and wine pairings. Dishes from the fall menu include a chicken liver mousse, a bourbon and lemon cocktail, celery root soup served with fall vegetable purees and a warm salad of apple-smoked salad with pickled apple and black garlic honey mustard and a churro made from manchego cheese. Almost every dietary restriction can be accommodated.
Meloy plans to continue Mug of the Month in its current iteration for two years, and then move both the dinners and the ceramics operation into a farmhouse. He hopes to create an experience akin to “old monasteries where visitors can hang out with the monks and watch them make cheese and beer.”
Credit: Courtesy of Kyle Shankman
Credit: Courtesy of Kyle Shankman
Speak Easy
Nearly seven years ago, Kyle Shankman’s then-teenage son, Trevor, expressed an interest in the food and beverage industry. Shankman, who has cooked professionally for more than 20 years, wanted Trevor to try making food for groups of people before pursuing it as a career, and suggested the pair join forces on a supper club they called Speak Easy.
In addition to showing Trevor the culinary ropes, Speak Easy (chefshankman.com/purchase-seats) also served as a way for Shankman, who had left restaurants for work as a corporate chef, to “scratch that creative itch. It was an opportunity to have a little more fun in the kitchen.”
Trevor was put in charge of buying groceries and menu planning for what was then a monthly dinner with eight of Shankman’s acquaintances making up the guest list.
“I let him own that process,” Shankman said. “I told him, ‘If you hate this, you’re probably not going to like restaurants’.”
Trevor did so well that the pair started getting requests from strangers to attend the dinners, the elder Shankman said. While Trevor stepped away from Speak Easy several years ago and launched his open his own supper club, Maria, earlier this year, Shankman has continued to welcome people into his Marietta home and other nearby venues for what has turned into four 14-seat dinners a month, which often sell out several weeks in advance.
Speak Easy’s menu, which changes every month, is an “ingredient-driven” experience, Shankman said, informed by food that’s in season and sourced as locally as possible.
Credit: Courtesy of Kyle Shankman
Credit: Courtesy of Kyle Shankman
“Sometimes it feels uniquely Southern, but sometimes it’s Spanish or southeast Asian, depending on where it starts,” he said. Recent dishes have included lasagna with sunchoke fonduta and caramelized fennel pomodoro and dry-aged duck breast with lacinto kale and blood orange-glazed celery root. Themed dinners, including a Halloween-themed meal that incorporated gothic iconography into the meal, “scratch a different itch for me,” Shankman said. “It’s theatrical, and it’s an excuse to do off-the-wall presentations.”
One item that makes it onto every menu: milk bread with honey lavender butter (”our regulars would come after us if we stopped,” he said), that’s an example of how hyperlocal the menu can get, with all ingredients coming from within 20 miles of Shankman’s house.
But for as much attention as Shankman gives to the quality and preparation of the food, he said it’s the camaraderie developed during each dinner that keeps diners coming back.
“I think the main reason people come is for the experiential side of things,” he said of his seven-course BYOB dinners that can accommodate most dietary restrictions. “It’s the opportunity to be at a communal table, meet other people and try something new. So we’ve leaned extra hard into improving and amping up that guest experience.”
To that end, Shankman is content to maintain Speak Easy’s supper club roots rather than turning it into a proper restaurant, unless the circumstances were completely perfect. “It would have to look and feel a lot like it does now,” he said.
Sign up for the AJC Food and Dining Newsletter
Read more stories like this by liking Atlanta Restaurant Scene on Facebook, following @ATLDiningNews on Twitter and @ajcdining on Instagram.
