With ‘Table for Four’ Motchamary Pushpam (in orange) and daughter Anita hope to revive dishes disappearing from Puducherry Supper clubs may be trending on Instagram, but try telling Fiammetta Maggio Pereira and Anita de Canaga that. Their reaction? “Oh, it’s a ‘thing’ now, is it?” Fiammetta, an Italian-born Chennai resident, and Anita, a Puducherrian with a French backstory, have been hosting supper clubs at their homes way before it became a hashtag — Fiammetta to help guests enjoy the present, Anita to let them savour the past. Fiammetta says it began when her Italian cooking classes became a hit. “The supper club was a natural progression,” says the textile entrepreneur, who runs home furnishing outfit Bottega Pereira. From the verandah of her Madhavaram home, she started hosting al fresco lunches for 12 to 20 guests, serving authentic Sicilian and Ligurian dishes. “Then Covid hit, and the lunches stopped, but I’m back to hosting,” says Fiammetta. Anita’s ‘Table for Four’ in Puducherry is a blend of French, Tamil and Vietnamese flavours, drawn from recipes passed down through generations. She began the supper club with her mother, Motchamary Pushpam, a decade ago, to revive dishes disappearing from Puducherry. “There are also Cambodian and African influences in the food,” says Anita, adding that her grandfather, part of the French administration, spent 40 years in Cambodia and Vietnam, bringing home a mélange of flavours that feature on their menu. One such inspired dish is ‘mutton margandam sambhar’, seasoned with vadouvan, a French-Tamil spice blend made with sun-dried ingredients. While Anita and Fiammetta built their guest lists over years, Madhumitha Sriram joined the supper club brigade when the concept began trending. The 22-year-old started Casa Savore a month ago, and now hosts six guests at a time every week in the dining room of her Alandur home. “We offer a six-course tasting menu, and the cuisine is decided by popular demand,” says Madhumitha. Most supper clubs, including hers, charge upwards of Rs 1,000 a head. Bookings come via Instagram, where guests fill out a Google form to get on the waiting list. “It’s great when strangers come together over a shared love for food but we do the form-filling for safety reasons,” says Madhumitha. Auditor Nithya Kaushik says she signed up for a Casa Savore evening to “step out of the usual mall-and movie routine”. Her table was a mix of young professionals and graduates on summer break. “It was a lovely evening of conversations about Chennai. It’s nice to hear different perspectives, especially since I’ve spent all my life here. The food too was interesting — pani puri with a kiwi infusion, for example,” says Nithya. “In Italy, the pleasure of eating is as much about lingering at the table and talking about food as it is about the food itself. India is similar, and that’s what a supper club recreates, that sense of being in the moment and enjoying it,” says Fiammetta
Dining and Cooking