The new era of healthy supperclubs

The all-conquering supper-club format is overdue a transformation. It’s no longer sufficient that the food is delicious; it must also be nutritious — all the better to meet the demands of Instagram’s hashtag gamut with. Food needs followers, after all.

A raft of new clubs has pushed ahead on the #healthy eating stakes (cauliflower steaks, for instance), blazing a trail towards healthier, happier supper clubs.

The autumn supper club calendar is dotted with ticketed events which look set to balance the science knowledge and good sense of both specialised and non-specialised chefs, from Wylde Feast’s five-course seasonal and nutritionally focused menu on October 4 to Oat Kitchen’s Yoga Diet dinner on October 13.

Those involved put the rise in supply and demand down to an urgent need for dietary re-education, which a browse online can’t satisfy.

“There’s a lot of bad marketing that’s made a villain of things like fats and sugars,” says Karen O’Donoghue, founder of The Happy Tummy Co, who is hosting the Gut Health Supper Club at South Kensington Club later in September as part of the Evening Standard’s Re Set Festival.

Supper club connoisseur: Oat Kitchen’s Charlotte Hopson

For six nights (September 24-29) the menu, also tailored by co-hosts Gutsy and Dorset & Deen, will focus on putting fizz, flora and fermentation into the subject of gut health — reframing healthy eating as fun, rather than simply functional. Treacle- and whisky-cured salmon and Koji-aged venison are among meats selected to encourage diversity among the microbacteria in your gut, an internal foundry that O’Donoghue likens to a “second brain” determining your cravings.

“And you should listen to those cravings”, she says. “Your body is telling you what it needs.” For instance, for a sweet tooth there are forest berries, or apple compote with vanilla and ginger bug.

“That’s a sugar hit, and it’s not a bad thing,” says O’Donoghue. “We have thousands of taste buds in our mouth for a reason. The idea behind a dinner like this is that we form food habits quickly, and so healthy eating can be shown not to sacrifice anything by way of flavour.”

Oat Kitchen dinners pair food with yoga movements, as it is “as much about the mind as it is the body”, according to founder Charlotte Hopson. “Our supper clubs always take place after some kind of yoga class or workshop and we explore a theme throughout the evening,” she says.

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The October event focuses on an Ayurvedic diet paired with yoga of the same school, offering a 75-minute flow class in Cambridge Heath before a candlelit dinner of grains, vegetables and soups. “We apply an 80:20 approach to our offerings in favour of healthy,” says Hopson. “The other 20 is focused on the more indulgent side of things. That being said, cakes, treats and desserts are always plant-based and we use naturally occurring sugars, fruit, nuts, dates, whole flours and oats.”

While the methods are diverse, the mission statement among clubs is consistent. “We have a vision and it’s making healthy food easy and affordable for everyone,” say sisters Flo and Joss Wylde, a nutritional therapist and a self-taught chef respectively.

Highlights of this east London club include a strawberry and orange compote with coconut and cashew cream and cacao nut crumb.

“We appreciate some people know very little about the medicinal properties of food, and others already have a foundation of knowledge, therefore we tailor the experience for each person.”

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The more singular the club, the better they stand out. In Richmond, skincare brand Aēsop has worked with Plates, a plant-based food studio, to produce four supper clubs themed around ingredients of the season, “Seasonal Metamorphosis”. Autumn is on September 27. The Bread Companion, a food blog, is offering a “How to eat your cactus” tutorial.

“These hardy plants are not only full of attitude but are loaded with goodness,” explains founder Julia Georgallis.

“Cholla buds, for example, contain more calcium in two teaspoons than a glass of milk.”

To book tickets to the Re Set Festival, visit thereset.standard.co.uk

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