supperclub SF
Posted in Restaurants on March 12th, 2006At 2 PM on Friday afternoon, one of my friends, J. called me. She’d made group reservations at supperclub SF 2 weeks ago for that night, and two of her party had cancelled on her. Did my husband and I want to join her? No, we’d never been, and yes, yes we did.
supperclub is an international chain of restaurants founded in Amsterdam, and the SF branch is the first one to open in the US. It’s a rotating prix fixe menu, $60 ($75 on Friday and Sat), not including drinks. It is indeed a place to get food, but more to the point, it’s a place to be entertained, pampered, and amused. Costumed waiters bring you truffle flavored popcorn as you recline shoeless on a huge bed that rings the entire restaurant and watch the floor show. Masseuses circle the room offering massages ($15 for 15 minutes.) The cooking is all done in a display kitchen in the back of the room (doubles as the bar after 12 AM.) Techno is playing at all times, although not so loudly that you can’t talk over it. They do only one seating per night, at 8 PM, and you should probably expect to be there until midnight. It’s currently one of the see and be seen places in SF, and the the clientele when we were there was strongly dominated by the hot hip young 20-something crowd. You’re advised to dress as if you were going to a club, not an expensive restaurant.
The theme changes every week, but on Friday it was clowns, so we had our *hawt* gay waiter with a red tinsel wig and red clown nose, wearing a t-shirt that said “Jesus is my homeboy.” There was a waitress in rollerskates and clown makeup doing tricks with an umbrella, and a guy with a long long beard, oversized blue coat, clown makeup, and a rubber chicken strapped into what looked suspiciously like a dildo harness, among many others.
We sprawled on the bed and pillows while watching the waitress in roller skates navigate stairs to comic effect, munching down on truffle flavored popcorn and olives, drinking champagne and chatting amongst ourselves. After roughly half an hour, the first course showed up: chicken satay with mango puree on the side served over lightly fermented bean sprouts. The chicken was really tender and flavorful, the bean sprouts unremarkable, roughly the same quality you’d get in any Korean run sushi restaurant as an amuse bouche.
More sprawling, more lounging, more clowns doing silly things. My friend J. was feeling inspired, and was trying out handstands against the wall, while my friend K. was getting a massage from the on staff masseuse. Half an hour later, the next course showed up, a Tuscan tomato and white bean soup in a small metal tin labelled “doggie tin”, with a label explaining in a long winded fashion why it is that Europeans have no idea what Americans mean when they ask for a doggie bag (apparently because they actually go to a restaurant to eat the food, the silly people!)
Post soup, I decided to try out the masseuse myself, and she proceeded to pound my back into submission in an incredibly competent and professional way, including realigning my spine, and massaging the tension spots in my hips without asking, the spots that most masseuses have to be told exist. Fully blissed and relaxed, I was ready to sink into one of the big soft white pillows on the bed, but the next course was appearing.
This time, it was whole leaves of hearts of romaine in a tumbler which had been coated with caesar salad dressing, and garnished with several square inches of a sheet of toasted parmesan, and what looked and tasted suspiciously like a dehydrated sheet of pureed beef jerky. There was also toasted baguette topped with a diced anchovy salad, and this entire plate came with a rubber glove on the side, but no fork. The expectation is that you don the rubber glove and eat the salad that way. Proctology jokes were starting to circulate the table, but the salad was delicious, including the beef, and the rubber glove not terribly intrusive, despite my concerns that it would flavor the food.
J., who was incredibly manic at this point, was beckoning me to the dance floor, as the techno that’d been playing all along started to pick up volume and pace. We went out and danced for about 15 minutes, including dragging my rhythm shy husband onto the floor, but we started to see plates circulating around the room, and headed back to our bed space to find goat cheese stuffed shrimp wrapped in bacon served over risotto and collard greens. I’d been mildly unimpressed with the appetizer and soup courses, but these were amazing. Tender, smoky flavored, rich… Our friend who is allergic to shell fish, had gotten the vegetarian entree, instead, which had roasted portobello mushroom and goat cheese. I thought about asking for a bite, but he was looking very defensive of his plate, so I had to take his word that it was delicious.
A few minutes later, the music stopped, and changed, and we saw the girl clown on roller skates and another male clown wearing a rubber chicken in a dildo harness take the floor. Intrigued, we all wandered out of our corner bed and sat next to the stairs, for what turned out to be a risque cabaret love scene on rollerskates. (Visualize passionate embrace a la one of the Harlequin/Columbine ballets, but on roller skates with rubber chicken.)
At this point, we’d polished off our 6th bottle of champagne, and a bottle of red wine, (amongst a party of 9), and I was starting to think about when I would next need to drive, when the manager came by with a complimentary bottle of ice wine. (One of our party had a rather bad experience on his last visit, and the manager was doing his best to make it up to him, and possibly hitting on him at the same time, since the friend in question is a young and somewhat attractive gay man.) I stole a few exquisite tastes of it off of my husband’s glass, and regretfully stopped there, and started drinking sparkling water.
However, dessert was yet to come. The waiter appeared with plates of pastry rolls, chopped fresh tropical fruit, and cream in little pastry decorating bags. The pastry rolls contained a small rolled up paper that explained that this was do it yourself cannoli. Squeeze cream into pastry, top with fruit, and enjoy. However, handing a room full of tipsy young hipsters a decorating bag of whipped cream can only go poorly, and soon everyone had found new and inapproriate things to do with the cream. I was hiding in the corner of the bed at this point, although J. kept trying to assault me with the cream, and I was going into sugar shock as politely as possible. Between the ice wine and the dessert, I was headed for a diabetic coma.
However, the music was getting louder and louder, and they were starting to let people in from the bar out front. Apparently this is not only a restaurant, it becomes a dance club after dinner. I am neither young nor perky enough to dance the night away after that kind of dinner, however, and my husband and I signaled our friends that we needed to head out as soon as possible. After a minor brawl over the check, as two of our friends simultaneously decided they wanted to make a beau geste, we managed to pay the bill, retrieve our shoes from under the the bed, and get underway. Mostly sober, we plowed a path through the packed throng of well dressed 20-somethings in the bar, acquired our car from the valet, and then made our way out through the lively streets of SOMA.