A Possible Future for Underground Dining

A Possible Future for Underground Dining

Recently, I was chatting with one of GAF’s students about underground dinners, and she asked me if I thought this dining genre, which is going progressively mainstream, had a future.

I’ve been to a few underground dinners in the past year, and though many adopt rave-like trappings (eleventh hour texts/emails announcing the secret location, outlaw aura, explicit requests not to reveal details of the event and so on), they were for the most part very fine catered events that were probably not even breaking any laws, darn it all any way.

Much like “underground newspapers” of the Sixties (e.g., Chicago Seed ) that were steps in American journalistic evolution, vestigial traces of which are discerned in today’s very respectable alternative weeklies (e.g., Chicago Reader), underground dinners or underground restaurants are in some cases evolving into more traditional brick and mortar versions. Last week, I read in GO Magazine (an in-flight rag) that a pop-up restaurant at Brooklyn Fare (a gourmet supermarket) was so popular that it’s planning to expand the dining room, get a liquor licenses and basically go legit as a regular old restaurant.

So GAF’s student’s question about the future of underground dinners got me thinking, and here’s how I believe a genuine alternative restaurant could survive and still be worthy of the designation “underground.” These presumably-below-the-law’s-radar bistros should start offering genuinely illegal food. I’m definitely not talking about endangered species (like the fine dining moveable feast in the late Marlon Brando’s late-career flick The Freshman ). I’m talking about serving food that is available in other countries but not here, such as:

• Fresh raw milk cheese aged under 60 days
• Donkey sausage and other smuggled salumi as mentioned in a recent WSJ journal article
• Horsemeat steaks, maybe even dog meat, etc.
• Finger limes and similarly forbidden fruits and vegetables that are awaiting approval for sale in the US
• Cuban wine (oh yeah, it exists, grown in a small microclimate on the island, not that great but like the cigars, unacceptably commie and so clearly contraband).

See, that would be chow I’d gladly pay a hefty premium for, gangsta grub that couldn’t be served at overground places that wanted to keep their licenses. These Smugglers’ Supper Clubs (or so they might be called) could even serve the very acceptable collateral function of educating the eating public (like me) about foods that are healthy and ethically reasonable to eat but that have not yet received the stamp of approval from regulating bodies in this country. They might even go some way in helping change overly restrictive food and drug laws.

There are legal complications, obviously, and I’ll leave that to attorneys, but here’s a possibility: this piratical picnic could feature a music group or two, and you would technically buy a ticket to hear the bands play and, oh, by the way, food is served, but it’s “complimentary,” on the house, no charge and no money is exchanged for it. There are probably still some laws being broken, but hey, that’s what the underground is all about.

Of course, it’s very possible such Smuggler’s Supper Clubs already exist – if you know of one, please PM me.

Steve Dolinsky weighs in on topic of underground dining.