In the US, they call them supper clubs; here, they are underground restaurants; in Cuba, paladares. They are a cross between a restaurant and a dinner party - like a restaurant, in the sense that you pay; like a dinner party, in the sense that you are in someone's house, with a regular someone cooking. It's really pretty simple, except for the counter-cultural tang that they are illegal.
Or perhaps that's too strong a word. Horton Jupiter, who runs The Secret Ingredient (every Wednesday at the moment), says, "No, no, no, I probably wouldn't call it illegal. I just don't want those pen-pushing tossbags at the council to find out. And my landlady doesn't know either."
Naturally, this makes it hard to advertise in a conventional way like having a sign on the street, so it's all word-of-mouth, by which I mean Facebook. Probably the best way to find out about underground restaurants in other towns is to be cool, and know cool people. In London there are three that I know about (Horton's place in Dalston, MsMarmiteLover's, which launched on Saturday in Kilburn, and one other), which means there must be more, surely? At the risk of making it so obvious that they get busted and shut down, you can find out about them by Googling keywords like "Horton" and "secret ingredient" and "MsMarmiteLover".
Now, I've never been to a US supper club, but I have been to Cuba, and I can say one downside to the paladares experience is how disgusting all the food is. You feel bad mentioning it, in a very poor country where black beans are ubiquitous for a reason and those mean Americans won't sell them any sugar (or is it the other way round?), but there it is: a plate of disgusting slop and then cheerio, amigo, you'll find a cola-based cocktail to rip out your stomach lining back at the hotel.
The Secret Ingredient is cheap, and - I remember this from being young - where cheap, cool things coincide, so do young, attractive people. Horton's front room is delicately lit with a flattering reddish hue that makes everything look soft and, if not clean, certainly not dirty. There are two tables for four, one for two. Me and MsMarmiteLover (she has a real name but insists I don't give it) are at one table, and there's a four who, I suspect and later verify, are known to the proprietor. Horton is putting out five courses for £10 a head; MsMarmiteLover is thinking of charging £15 for her night. They're both vegetarians and, as MsMarmite (for short) points out, nobody would do this to make money. But I am struggling to see how they will even clear their shopping bill. Does Horton have a cash-and-carry card? Do cash- and-carries still exist?
Apparently there's a formula: you take the cost of the ingredient, times it by three, divide by your number of diners, and that's how much it's costing per head. The first course is some pickled onion. Not like in a pub, dumpkopf; in a Japanese style, with a proper mini bowl and chopsticks. This is fine, though if it was your first meal on a week-long monastic retreat you wouldn't be surprised. There follows a plate of vegetable mignons: a cabbage roll with a strong seaweed topnote, a radish with a teeny slice of lemon in it, and a green bean with some strips of carrot, bundled together with seaweed. The cabbage is a bit waterlogged but, otherwise, these are delicious. I have spent 15 times as much on carrots that tasted of 15 times as little.
MsMarmite also came to Horton's last week, when he did a Buddhist recipe for the first course: a whole onion that you simmer forever in its skin. But after, like, forever, the onions were done and he needed the pan, so he took them out and they deflated and looked depressed. She says this pickled version is miles better. I say an onion is an onion is an onion, until you put some cheese on it and turn it into a crisp.
MsMarmite is not impartial, anyway; she and Horton know each other from years ago when they were in an anarchist Samba band. He's now in another band (They Came From The Stars, I Saw Them), and she cooks for an anarchist vegan cafe, Pogo. I ask, "Would you say there was quite a big anarchist/ music/ home restaurant crossover, then?", and she looks at me as if I'm a bit thick and says, "yeah . . ." There's another home restaurant that MsMarmite's been to, in the east London area, where they all dress up as Marie Antoinette. "They have a chef there, though. Because it's enough work just dressing up as Marie Antoinette."
Right! Third course: slices of sweet potato sprinkled with togarishi (hot pepper powder), delicious salty tofu balls that are a bit healthy-man's-chicken-nuggets and some great, chewy Japanese mushrooms. After that, sushi rice, miso soup and some delicious Japanese pickles that kick like a mule. And finally, a slice of starfruit, a raspberry and a blackberry, with a white miso, sugar, mirin and water dressing - a confection of Jupiter's own devising, which is very nice. Oh, and some sake.
It's cheaper than a take-out, with a phenomenal sense of occasion and someone else's iPod. There is idiosyncrasy and sparkle created by someone else's music; in restaurants it is always too cool, or too unobtrusive, or too stupid.
And once you see it all done for that amount, you can think of loads of ways to do it even cheaper. I reckon you could go Moroccan and bring it all home for a tenner a head, though only if everyone liked chickpeas. But our meal was more endearing than a great big stew or a curry; the sheer labour implied love. All that chopping and rolling and making fancy - and they were doing a second sitting as well.
In Lisbon once, I went to something similar in someone's front room, but there, people do it for the money, and it really is illegal, and we were all instructed to sing Happy Birthday in Portuguese if a policeman came in. It was exhilarating, and so was this.
A fellow diner, Hannah, raised the objection she'd have as host: "But people you don't know," she said, "coming into your home, with all your possessions in it . . ." From the diner's point of view, that's what makes it: all the barriers of society are collapsed. There you are, in someone's house. You don't know them! What's to stop you trampling in mud and nicking their see-through limited-edition Lionel Ritchie? Nothing! There's just you, being a nice person to have in a house, decent, trustworthy, for the hell of it. That's the core: not the eating, not the value, not the cool and beauty and credit crunch - it's the situationist thrill. Beneath the pavement, the sand. Beyond the restaurant, the stranger's house, with food in it.
I wonder if it only works, then, because of the anarchist atmosphere. If I had to go into a regular, middle-aged couple's house, with regular, middle-range mess, almost tidied up but not quite, with a regular, frantic person trying to cook coq au vin - if I had to go into a house like mine, I think I would feel really, really awkward.
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