A green leaf wedged in between your bottom two teeth. A splotch of red sauce on your white shirt. Chewing with your mouth open — or better yet — that slight “mmmm” that escapes your mouth when taking a bite of something incredibly good. The act of eating can be embarrassing, intimate, personal — and we’re not even talking about dinner conversation. Sharing a meal with someone can tell you a lot about that person. And willingly eating a meal with strangers? It can be nerve-wracking and most likely something none of us have thought very much about for the past two coronavirus-filled years.

As we continue to find our way into whatever we want our ongoing pandemic lives to be, two Seattle restaurateurs are betting on strangers becoming friends over dinner and the idea that people are yearning for community. They’re betting on supper clubs.

If you’re from the Midwest, the concept of a supper club might be a familiar one. Incredibly popular in Wisconsin, supper clubs are the stuff of legends — families have their favorites running multiple generations. They’re convivial and cozy. A relaxed atmosphere where the menu skews to ample portions of comforting classics: prime rib, fried chicken, lots of cheese. Dinner starts with a relish tray and ends hours later with you probably making friends with a nearby table. Supper clubs are about tradition, community and connection. 

Seattle now has two supper clubs of its own — both run by women who had never been to a supper club, yet seemed to know exactly what they’re about. 

Stef Hieber is the mastermind behind Lola’s Supper Club. Along with her business partner and best friend Jose Garzón, Hieber also runs Garzón Latinx Street Food (which has a permanent residency in the kitchen of Belltown’s Black Cat Bar) and Ekeko, a pop-up centered around drinking snacks.

The idea for Lola’s Supper Club came to Hieber one evening when Garzón made her an Ecuadorian dinner based on recipes from his childhood. It was simple food with a story, and as he finished cooking, he made her a plate combining all the dishes. That physical gesture of “hospitality and love” as she calls it, made a big impression on Hieber. She realized she wanted to share this experience with a larger audience; throw an event where strangers passed plates like they were at Thanksgiving dinner.

Her definition of a supper club is a “community-style table, sitting with strangers, experiencing culture. Strangers breaking bread, having friends and more worldview when they leave.”

At the end of May she launched Lola’s Supper Club, named in homage to Garzón’s mother’s cousin Lola, the woman who helped raise him and his five sisters in Guayaquil, Ecuador, while their mother worked.

Hieber hosted the first event in late June at Pioneer Square’s Bad Bishop Bar, the dining room set up for 18 diners at one long table. Garzón was the featured chef. Framed photos of him and his family from his childhood dotted the bar and side tables, which gave off a vibe that you were in someone’s home. There was salsa music blaring on the record player.

People could only purchase a maximum of two tickets each — Hieber says she didn’t want “people to have dinner with a cluster of their friends.”

“It’s not let’s go on a date night and get away from people, it’s a community-driven experience,” she says.

I grabbed a ticket for the event and came alone, as did a few others, but many of the ticket holders brought a buddy. I felt so awkward at first, thrust into a social situation with strangers and suddenly found my list of unread emails quite compelling. While grabbing a glass of sparkling wine at the bar, I found a fellow diner doing the same and decided to put my phone away and engage in awkward, casual “getting to know you” conversation as additional guests trickled in — but as soon as we were seated everyone was fully engaged.

The menu Garzón put together for the evening was called “A Day in the Life.” It detailed what he would have eaten for desayuno (breakfast), almuerzo (lunch), merienda (dinner), and postre (dessert) — with an intermesso he called a “stretch yo legs break,” during which diners got up and danced and got to know people from other ends of the table.

As each course was presented — on platters, designed to be passed and shared — Garzón took a few minutes to describe each dish. The meal opened with a cup of café con leche and salty crackers, Lola’s fry bread and humitas — a fresh corn cake steamed in a husk. Garzón talked about how as a kid he would crumble his crackers into his coffee, eating it almost like cereal.

His family moved around when he was a kid — from the mountains to the coastal areas of Ecuador, then finally to the Galápagos Islands when he was 14. He left home at 17, living in Puerto Rico and eventually Seattle, traveling the world with a band before settling here. The journey through the rest of the menu took us through the fried fish and white rice with salsa criolla of his surfing days on the beach for almuerzo and back again to the stewed lentils and pork and beef parrillada of his early childhood in the mountains of Ecuador.

The level of chatter steadily rose as the night progressed. We talked a little bit about work — there was a woman who has been painting a gorgeous mural in one of the bathrooms at Bad Bishop — but we also talked about the city and what we love about it, kids, traveling and how we all found ourselves there that night. I now follow four of my fellow dinner companions on Instagram, “hearting” their life updates.

The guests weren’t the only ones who made connections.

For Garzón, the event resulted in a renewed connection with his family. In preparation for the event he reached out to his five older sisters, his mother and Lola to see how his memories compared to theirs. He now talks to Lola every few weeks and has plans to visit Ecuador for the first time in 10 years. “There’s been a lot of soul searching after Lola’s,” he says.

That soul searching wasn’t the goal for Heiber necessarily, but that sense of connection very much was. 

Connection is also what is at the forefront of Courtney Geilenfeldt’s Dining with Friends supper club.

Currently held on the back deck of her Burien house, her and her husband Zach’s small flock of chickens clucking quietly in the background, Dining with Friends was Geilenfeldt’s way of finding community while also finding a way back to herself.

She and her husband Zach got married in September 2021, an event she says felt like a graduation of sorts because right afterwards many friends moved away. The couple was living on Vashon Island at the time — Geilenfeldt was running a pop-up/bagel subscription service called Bakery Darlene — but decided to move to Seattle for a fresh start. Feeling burnt out, she put Bakery Darlene mostly on hiatus and was trying to figure out her next moves.

“It was like this identity crisis. I want to do something with food, but I’ve been hurt too much in the industry world. I want this connection because my community has moved and we’ve been in a pandemic and a winter,” Geilenfeldt says.

She had hosted a few small dinners with strangers over 10 years ago while living in San Diego, and realized that was the answer to what she was craving. She calls Dinner with Friends her “coming out of my shell moment to meet new people and do something that feels a little bit more right.”

Tickets are capped at eight people; Geilenfeldt and her husband sit with diners at meals, making a max party of 10. She’s hosted four in Seattle since May and one in her former home base of San Diego.

Geilenfeldt’s back deck has an incredibly welcoming vibe; peek-a-boo views of the Seattle skyline, bistro lights strung overhead, the table set with crisp linens and an abundance of flowers. The menus are a combination of things she’s craving mixed with whatever is in season, based around a loose theme.

I’ve been twice — the first was an all Italian-themed dinner that began with mashed fava beans drenched in ramp oil atop burrata and continued with cauliflower with salsa verde and hazelnuts, fat cavatelli tossed in a spring pea ragu, and a creamy roasted mushroom farroto that I still think about. The second was a brunch event, the menu based on the things she missed eating while living in Berlin — a buffet of buckwheat granola with thick yogurt and blueberry compote, thick-cut bostock with plum jam, frangipane, and raspberries, a smoked salmon salad, and soft-boiled eggs with browned butter walnuts.

The pace is relaxed with Geilenfeldt sitting down and eating between presenting courses. Food is served on platters where guests end up serving each other and pouring wine for the table. Much like with Lola’s Supper Club, conversations are wide-ranging but light. There was no agenda, but the conversation naturally drifted to how difficult it is to make and maintain friendships through change. For some that change was graduating from college, for others it came in the form of the pandemic or an isolated career, but almost every diner expressing a desire for meaningful connection in their lives. Geilenfeldt says she had one event where nearly all the attendees knew each other — which led to an evening that at first felt like she was a private chef catering a party — but things eventually relaxed and there were still opportunities for connection.

“I always feel this fulfillment after Supper Club. Not only am I nourished and I feel fulfilled because I nourished other bodies, but keeping it at the size it is, allows for each person to be seen and have their own space to connect and show themselves,” Geilenfeldt says.

And while Lola’s has a more focused, cultural component where a chef will reveal a very personal side to themselves, stories of immigration, migration or cultural traditions — the thing these two supper clubs have in common is that hope for connection.

Heiber was busy in the kitchen for most of the Lola’s event, and found herself having to pause a moment and remind herself what it was all for.

“These people are engaging and absorbing. That was the goal and the intention. You manifest for it, you pray over it, and it was a thing. People became friends after it. We gained regulars and are doing caterings. It became a little community,” Heiber says.

Hieber is deep in planning mode for the next iteration of Lola’s Supper Club, scheduled for mid-September. Tickets can be found on their website (garzonpnw.com/lolassupperclub). The bar is set high, but she knows the desire for community is strong.

Geilenfeldt is also looking ahead to her next event, scheduled for Sept. 10 (tickets will be announced via her Instagram), saying she still has a craving for feeding people and hoping that by doing that, conversation and connection will happen.

The opinions expressed in reader comments are those of the author only and do not reflect the opinions of The Seattle Times.