Supper Club serves up £100,000 for hospitality sector
ORIENTAL PALACE: A rare visit to a Chinese restaurant for a recent event
By Phil Ascough
It started with concerns about a Monday malaise.
There wasn’t enough for business people to do on a Monday evening. More often than not they would just stay at home. Wouldn’t it be good if there was something to tempt them out? Maybe a supper club?
The remarks came during Humber Business Week 2014 from Jan Brumby, CEO of FEO. When I read them I responded PDQ.
At the time one of my PR clients was Tapasya, the original game-changing Indian restaurant on Beverley Road. I told Jan I’d love to launch a supper club and Tapasya would host the first three. Then I told the restaurant owners and, fortunately, they loved the idea.
We recruited arts and health consultant Elaine Burke to extend our reach into the cultural sector, we’re now in our tenth year and we might mark the milestone with a few special events. Or not. One of the ideas from the outset was that the Monday Night Supper Club would be as hassle-free as possible.
We don’t do formal membership, speeches, name badges or anything like that. We did have a strap line: “Not networking, but not working”. Although it’s not often that we can be bothered to use it.
What we do have is a fairly strict approach to respect. If people fail to respond to my monthly email alerts three or four times in a row they’ll probably be removed from the list. If people cancel their booking at short notice, or fail to show on the night, they risk being asked to pay anyway.
We still have that aim of giving people a fun option on a quiet Monday night, and that works hand in hand with the main raison d’etre – supporting the hospitality sector.
Obviously if we’re bringing in anything between maybe 20 to 70 paying customers we have certain expectations when it comes to the restaurants, and over nearly ten years you can count those venues that have fallen short on the tines of a fork.
One of them was ditched because with only a week to go they advised that they could only offer one starter, one main and one dessert. We lost another after their complacency stretched to failing to check who had turned up and who had paid, and then expecting us to chase everybody up.
Another place became a problem when, for no particular reason, we were hit by more than a dozen late cancellations and no-shows. I tracked down all of them, they promised to pay but the restaurant didn’t keep a record of who had stumped up. We can’t work like that.
Back in the days when we used to work with restaurants to offer three courses for £20, one particular place just outside Hull said they couldn’t do it. I pointed to their offer of three courses and a glass of wine for £24.95. Surely they could drop the wine, charge £20 and make plenty of money from most of our crowd of about 50 people spending well over £4.95 on drinks? They refused.
THE LODGE: The venue for the 78th Supper Club gathering
We do a fair bit of research, which is why every supper club we’ve had has been a big hit with the diners and with the restaurants. Some favourites have disappeared over the years – that first Tapasya, the wonderful 1884 Wine & Tapas Bar, Jardelle, our go-to Beverley destination. New places are being added all the time, with our first visits to Raj Pavilion and Oriental Palace only coming in recent months. The most recent event at The Lodge at Sutton Golf Club was our 78th. Not bad given the disruption from Covid.
In March 2020 we’d booked upstairs at Furley & Co and I was enjoying a pre-supper club Stella when I saw the newsflash that the Prime Minister had advised people to stay away from pubs and restaurants. We went ahead with that night’s event but within half an hour the numbers crashed from 36 to 18.
It was November 2021 before we were able to return. We responded to the struggles in hospitality by changing the offer to two courses for £20, and more recently we’ve advised the venues to charge whatever it costs.
That rules out some of the high-end restaurants because we don’t want cost to become a barrier to an event which attracts a range of businesses from major employers to sole traders. It also means we can concentrate on helping the smaller operators to keep their doors open.
There’s no shortage of them and, after nearly ten years, we’re still exploding the myth about there being nowhere decent to eat in Hull. At the rate of one a month it’s impossible to get round all of the restaurants we know in just a year. If we struggle to fit a venue into our schedule we’ll still tell people where it is so they can find it themselves.
Calculating the value of supper club to the hospitality sector is a bit of a guessing game but we reckon we’re nudging £100,000 direct spend based on food price per head for an average of maybe 35 people at 78 events. We’re including drinks in that, but not repeat visits and recommendations.
Deborah Spicer, now part of the team at The Lodge, maintains that when she was director of 1884 Wine & Tapas Bar every supper club she hosted generated a wave of additional business.
Julian Wild, a consultant and director of Rollits LLP and a supper club regular since the start, is in no doubt about the appeal to the business community. He said: “It’s a unique opportunity to bring together like-minded people in the business community in Hull and the surrounding area and at the same time to support independent local restaurants, It gives good value for money and an opportunity to enjoy good company and good conversation.”