Regret Me Not Project Day 111: Midnight Brunch

It was 2 am and I had just finished a beautiful slice of pineapple icebox cake.

The late night cake was not the result of a stumbling trip to the refrigerator in the middle of the night.

In fact, I barely realized that it was 2 am, and my apartment was miles away.

I was, instead, sitting in the basement of a beautiful brownstone in Brooklyn, looking out over a table occupied by empty plates, tall green glass bottles of water, craft cocktails with delicate orange peel and hand cut ice, and candles illuminating the faces of the incredibly interesting people around me.

This was Midnight Brunch and it was my first experience at an underground supper club (and I love the fact that my first experience was quite literally underground).

It was the most ancient of experiences, facilitated in the most modern of ways. I knew about the supper club because a few months earlier, I had followed a Twitter trail through a friend’s tweets and came across Emily Cavalier, who has a great blog focused on ethnic food called Mouth of the Border.

With a growing personal interest in food and craft cocktails, I began following Emily.

Then, soon after moving to the city a few weeks ago, I saw a Tweet from her about Midnight Brunch come across my Twitter feed. A few emails and really crazy “holy crap this is a small world” connections later, and I was on the guest list for the first Midnight Brunch.

So what exactly is a supper club? It’s basically a dinner party, but not. It’s the result of adding up just the right elements to create a dining experience that is greater then the sum of its parts.

The concept of a supper club might elicit a little bit of eye-rolling. But I don’t think that everything that becomes trendy in Brooklyn should be automatically judged and labeled as a hipster cliché.

Supper clubs like Midnight Brunch do offer something special:

Rarity
It’s not something you do every night. It’s also not something that everyone gets to go to. There was only room for about twenty people. We got to sample a new product from a spirit company that’s not even on the market yet. We got to try Emily’s experiment of fried jerk chicken (which was amazing!). Being rare and unique made it feel extraordinary.

Art
The term art, applied broadly, means something beyond simply creating a painting or a piece of music. It means expending emotional energy and taking risks to create something magnificent. The Midnight Brunch was an embodiment of creating art: Emily had to expend emotional energy to curate the right group of attendees, she had to put effort into creating a menu, finding the right ingredients and building a team to help her deliver a fantastic meal, and she had to take the risk that the whole thing could be a disaster. The evening was a collaboration of passionate people – from the amazing couple who provided the space for the dinner to the mixologists crafting the cocktails. If Emily and her collaborators hadn’t expended emotional energy and taken a risk, then we would have been having dinner at McDonald’s.

Connection
The act of eating together has long-provided human beings with the opportunity to experience connections that make our lives more meaningful. Across the dining table we exchange ideas, thoughts, feelings, hospitality, caring and love. As Oliver Wendall Holmes commented in an 1858 column in The Atlantic Monthly: “A dinner-party made up of such elements is the last triumph of civilization over barbarism.” Dining together serves as a good reminder of our shared humanity.

Rarity. Art. Connection. The recipe for an amazing Midnight Brunch, and so much more.

You can read more about New York’s supper clubs in this great Grub Street story.