What Is a Supper Club & why should you try one this weekend?
What's a Supper Club, Anyway?
If you'd asked me two years ago what a supper club was, I wouldn't have had a fancy answer either. Now I'd just say - it's dinner at someone's house, cooked by someone who actually wants you there. No menu card. No waiter hovering. Just one table, one evening, and a meal made the way it's always been made in that home, not the way a restaurant kitchen would make it.
That's it. That's the whole thing. Strip away the word "supper club" and it's just what my mother did every festival - Meal at someone's actual home, cooked by them, for a small table of people who booked a seat instead of a table.
Why is everyone suddenly talking about it?
(And Why I Think You Should Come Try Mine)
Honestly, I ask myself this too. Forbes India wrote a whole piece on it recently "Supper Clubs - What's the next course?" and one Mumbai-based guest they spoke to put it simply:
"You walk into a restaurant, eat well, and come back feeling good. You walk into a supper club, and you come back with so much more"
That line stuck with me, because it's exactly what I hear from guests as they're leaving my own dinner table.
Curly Tales has been covering Mumbai's supper club scene closely too - a Gujarati one in the suburbs, a vegan one run from someone's kitchen, a Sichuan night hosted every weekend. It's not one big trend, it's a hundred small ones, all saying the same thing: people are tired of eating alone, eating fast, or eating out somewhere loud and impersonal, and started wanting a proper table again - a host, a story, a reason to actually show up.
Forbes has covered this shift more than once, writing about home-hosted supper clubs and how personal, small-scale dining is having a real moment. Mumbai's clearly hungry for this, and the coverage from various media houses keeps proving it.
How did Anvaya come into existence?
Very simply - it's my grandmother's kitchen in Bangalore, moved to Thane. I grew up around Kannada Smartha Brahmin cooking, the kind with no onion, no garlic, everything built on homemade ghee and proper tempering, served on a banana leaf. When I moved to Mumbai, I missed that food badly enough that I started cooking it for people myself, first for friends, then for actual strangers who'd heard about it and wanted a seat.
Anvaya is that, made official - Bangalore, Mysore and Sringeri traditions, cooked the way they were always cooked at home, now open to anyone who wants to sit at the table.
Why should someone actually experience a supper club?
Because it feels different from eating out, in a way that's hard to explain until it happens to you.
You're not one of forty tables being managed - you're the only table that evening. Someone's cooking specifically for you, telling you why a dish is made a certain way, and by the end of it you're talking to strangers like you've known them a while.
At Anvaya specifically, you also get to eat food that most people outside Karnataka rarely encounter done properly - not the dosa-and-idli idea of South Indian food, but the real, home-style Kannada Brahmin table.
Anvaya seats eight people, one table, every Friday, Saturday and Sunday in Thane.
Reserve at experienceanvaya.com or WhatsApp us on +91 7406319391.
Apoorva Prakash Founder, Anvaya
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