I’ve struggled to make friends my entire life. And as I’ve gotten older, it’s become increasingly difficult to even maintain the few friendships I do have with jobs, family and hobbies all screaming for a moment of my time. Months can go by before I realize I haven’t reached out to speak with, catch up, or spend time with, even our nearest and dearest friends.
Enter the supper club that changed my life.
People throw around the term “life changing” a lot, but when I say starting a dinner club with friends CHANGED my life, I mean it. Which is why I want to share all the details for how to start a supper club, so you can experience the joy, connection and community this has brought to my life too!
What Is a Friends Supper Club?
The term “supper club” can mean different things to different people, but for the purposes of this post, we’re defining a supper club as an organized, recurring, potluck-style gathering with an intimate group of friends, hosted in each other’s homes.
A supper club can look similar to a dinner party or a potluck at first glance, but the structure and intention are what make it different.
How Is A Supper Club Different From A Dinner Party Or Potluck?
A dinner party is usually a one-off event. One person hosts, plans the menu, and does most of the cooking and coordinating. Guests show up, enjoy the evening, and that’s it. There’s no built-in rhythm or expectation that it will ever happen again, and the mental and organizational labor of making it happen tends to fall on the same person every time.
A potluck is typically more casual and often centered around convenience. Everyone brings a dish, but there isn’t always a clear theme or any coordination. The focus is less on the experience and more on feeding a group easily. The guest list is often open-ended and usually doesn’t come with any recurring expectation or shared planning.
A supper club sits somewhere in between.
In a supper club:
- The gathering happens on a regular schedule, usually monthly.
- Hosting rotates, so no one person carries the responsibility every time.
- The host sets a theme or direction for the menu, which gives the food a sense of cohesion.
- Everyone contributes food that follows the set theme (like a potluck), but the night still feels more curated rather than casual (like a dinner party).
- The guest list is typically more intimate and consistent.
The biggest difference is that a supper club is designed to be ongoing. It’s not just a single dinner or an easy way to feed a group. It’s a shared tradition that creates consistency, connection, and a reason to gather every month, while distributing the mental and organizational labor across the group instead of placing it on one person.
Why We Started Our Monthly Supper Club
Like a lot of folks, many of our closest friendships were formed during seasons of life where we shared the same hobbies or were in similar stages. As time passes and people continue to grow and evolve, hobbies change and lives naturally move in different directions.
One person has a kid, someone else finds a new hobby. One friend goes back to grad school, another gets a new job that demands more of their time. When that happens, friendships can start to slip away as the built-in ways you used to see each other slowly erode.
For our friend group, a monthly supper club became the anchor point we needed to stay connected.
It didn’t require a lot of anyone’s time. It was casual enough to allow hosting friends with kids at home, budget-friendly enough that it didn’t strain anyone’s pocketbook, and consistent enough to keep us connected and involved in each other’s lives in a meaningful way.
And of course, a huge bonus was that we all loved to cook. The supper club gave us an excuse to share food with one another, try new recipes, and explore cuisines from different cultures.
One of my favorite supper club themes so far was our open flame cooking night!
How to Start A Supper Club With Friends
Now that I’ve told you WHY a monthly dinner club with friends has changed my life, let’s get into all the nitty gritty details for how to start a supper club of your own!
I’ll break down all the essentials in this post, but if you want a more in depth guidebook and complete toolkit, head over to my shop to download my “How to Start a Supper Club | Complete, Handbook, Cookbook & Planner Toolkit”!
How to Start a Supper Club | Complete Handbook, Cookbook & Planner Toolkit
Your complete guide for how to start a supper club! Everything you need to plan, host, and enjoy a stress-free supper club with friends. Includes a fully editable Canva template!
Setting Your Supper Club Guest List
If you already have a close-knit group of friends, this will be the easy part, since your supper club member list is likely already set.
If you’re curating a list from scratch, my recommendation is to include anywhere from 6–12 people, not counting children.
You want enough people to spread out the mental and organizational load, while keeping the group small enough that you can still visit and catch up with everyone.
I’m also firmly of the belief that sitting down at a table together to eat is vital to the magic, which is why I’d limit the guest list to the number of people you can comfortably seat for a shared meal.
You’ll also want to include people who enjoy cooking, are open to exploring new cuisines, and love a good dinner conversation.
Lastly, a supper club can be formed either from a group of people you’re already friends with, or curated intentionally from people you’d like to build deeper friendships with too!
Decide On A Frequency & Format For Your Dinner Club
After your guest list set, the next important step is deciding on a frequency for your group to meet and the format the meeting will follow. Here are some of the most common options. The key is to pick something everyone can consistently commit to.
Meeting Frequency
Our group meets monthly, but if that doesn’t work for your group there are other options you can look into as well:
- A Monthly Gatherings (The Most Common)
- A Bi-Monthly Gathering
- A Quarterly / Seasonal Gathering (good for big groups with tight schedules)
Supper Club Format Options
There are an infinite number of ways you could format this sort of gathering, but I’m just going to give you 5 ideas to get started with:
Rotating Host, Themed Potluck (This Format Is A Classic For A Reason)
- Host rotates each month
- Host chooses a food theme
- Guests bring dishes that fit the theme
- Low pressure and easy to sustain long-term
Cookbook Club–Style Supper Club
- Group selects one cookbook per month or season
- Each person cooks a recipe from that book
Collaborative Cooking Supper Club
- Everyone brings ingredients for a meal, and the group cooks together at the host’s home
- Turns meal prep into a social, interactive experience that builds cooking skills over time for those that don’t already have them.
International/World Cuisine Supper Club
- Each month focuses on a different country or region
- Host or group curates dishes from that cuisine
Course-Based Supper Club
- Host assigns courses (appetizer, main, side, dessert, drinks)
- Helps balance the menu
Our personal supper club is a mix of a themed potluck and collaborative cooking, so feel free to get creative and design a format that inspires joy for you and your group.
A cranberry cocktail with fresh rosemary from our Friendsgiving supper club and a strawberry rhubarb galette I brought to a veggie themed supper club for dessert one month.
Rotate the Dinner Club Host
No matter what frequency and format you choose one vital element of this club is the host rotation system.
This ensure that the physical, mental and organizational labor involved in hosting is equally divided amongst the group.
You can create a set rotation roster for this and simply assign each upcoming supper club meeting to the next person in the rotation.
Or, if you want a bit more flexibility (and you trust your friends to spread the load equally) you can simply ask who wants to host next at the end of each supper club meeting. If you go this route, just be sure you get this settled before everyone leaves!
Scheduling Your Meetings
This is arguably the hardest part of organizing any group of people together. So to begin with I suggest just starting. Pick a day, gather as many of the people as are available and just get started. Not everyone will be able to make it, and that’s ok.
During your first meeting you can discuss what days and times for future monthly friends dinners work best for the group and go from there.
We’ve found the polling system built into the facebook messenger app works really well for our group. If you’d prefer not to use facebook messenger a website like https://whenavailable.com/ is free and works great as well!
A Few Quick Scheduling Tips:
- If kids are included, be mindful to plan around nap and bedtime windows.
- Consider choosing a consistent night each month to make planning easier.
- Set dates at least one month in advance so everyone has time to prepare.
This is an example of how you can still host a more elegant, fine dining supper club, while including children. For our friendsgiving supper club, we set this formal table and then set modified children’s place settings for the 2yr old, 3yr old and 5yr old in our group. They all did great and loved it!
Coordinate The Menu
Finally the fun part, setting the theme and menu for your get together!
For the purposes of our personal group, we have decided that whoever is hosting gets to decide on the theme of the food for the meeting. Which seems like a fair trade off for having to deep clean your bathroom and host a bunch of people. (If choosing a theme feels daunting, don’t worry, I have a list for you at the bottom of this post).
After the theme is set, have each person in the group share what they will be bringing to avoid any overlap and ensure a balanced menu.
If you’d like a more structured system for dividing up courses and planning out an entire year of themed meetings, I created a printable supper club planner that walks you through it step-by-step that you can find it here!
Allergies, Food Restrictions & Dietary Preferences
Curating an environment in which everyone feels safe, seen and cared for is one of the primary goals of any group. Which is why taking into account everyone’s various allergies, food restrictions and dietary preferences is so incredibly important.
Does that mean EVERYTHING you make for your supper club needs to meet every single person’s dietary restrictions? Not necessarily.
Sometimes you really want to try out that authentic homemade pasta recipe and share the results with your friends. In those instances we try and provide a version that everyone can have. So someone is bringing homemade pasta, maybe someone else will provide gluten free pasta as well. If one person is bringing a meat dish, another person may bring a vegetarian option with similar spices.
In our group we have to navigate: gluten free, dairy free, egg free, peanut free, banana free and coconut oil free options. Several of which allergies are severe enough to land the person in the ER if we aren’t careful with our food prep and labeling.
To make this easier to manage my, “How to Start a Supper Club | Complete, Handbook, Cookbook & Planner Toolkit”! includes a printable food card that has helped our group clearly label allergens and dietary information!
Setting Supper Club Expectations
Before (or at) your first official meeting, it’s worth having a quick conversation about what this club is meant to be. Things I’d be sure and discuss are:
- How often you’ll meet and how seriously attendance will be prioritized
- How hosting will rotate and what the host is responsible for
- Any general budget expectations for ingredients or drinks
- Dietary restrictions and how your group wants to handle them
- The overall tone (family-friendly or adults only, formal or casual?)
- What communication method you’ll use to coordinate details
- Membership exclusivity (will this be a private set guest list or an open group?)
This will help your club members have a shared understanding of what the expectations are for your group so everyone feels comfortable and no one person ends up carrying more than their share.
Epic french toast from our breakfast themed supper club, and rack of smoked ribs for our BBQ theme night!
Supper Club Theme Ideas
Need some supper club theme ideas to get you started!? Here are a list of my top 5 favorite creative supper club themes we’ve done with our group so far! (If you want even more theme ideas, be sure and download my complete Supper Club Handbook, Cookbook & Planner here! It includes over 50 unique supper club theme ideas!)
Bonfire Night With Open Flame Cooking
While I try to put down my phone and camera during our monthly meetings so I can be fully present, I did happen to document this bonfire night we hosted here on my blog! Everyone had a blast coming up with sweet and savory s’mores to make and finding recipes for food we could cook outside over our solo stove or in the BBQ.
Italian Food & Collaborative Ravioli Making
After some of our friends came back from a trip to Italy, they decided to host an Italian food night where they would show us everything they learned on their trip about making homemade Italian pasta and ravioli from scratch!
Soup, Soup & More Soup
I did not have high expectations for this theme, but it ended up being so fun! Everyone brought a pot of their favorite soup to share, or a soup recipe they’ve wanted to try and we all got to have a mini “flight” of soup for dinner! (In full transparency we also brought a roast chicken for the small children to refused to each any of the soups lol)
Veggies Only Please
Even if no one in your group is vegetarian, I highly recommend hosting a veggies only supper club meeting! Nights like this are great for finding new ways to cook veggies, taste options for veggies dishes you’ve never tried before and get ideas for how to bring more veggies into your regular food rotation.
Breakfast For Dinner
Do I really need to explain the appeal of getting to eat a giant pile of french crepes and bacon for dinner? I think not.
I only have some quick cell phone snaps of this meal, but we had so much fun making homemade ravioli together for an Italian themed supper club one night. Other guests brought beef tagliata, a fresh burrata salad, and homemade tagliatelle with ragù sauce.
Frequently Asked Questions
Whew, that was a lot of information. To recap, here are answers to the most common supper club questions I get:
What Size Should A Supper Club Be?
My recommendation is to include anywhere from 6 to 12 people.
You want enough people to spread out the mental and organizational load, while keeping the group small enough that you can still visit and catch up with everyone.
I’m also firmly of the belief that sitting down at a table together to eat is vital to the magic, which is why I’d limit the guest list to the number of people you can comfortably seat for a shared meal.
How Often Should A Supper Club Meet?
Once a month is the most traditional format.
Other options include meeting bi-monthly or even quarterly/seasonally if your group of friends has a particularly tight schedule.
Should Guests Bring Food or Drinks To A Supper Club?
Yes, each guest is expected to bring at least one food or drink item to share with the group.
Depending on the format the group, that can either mean that each person is expected to bring a fully cooked dish to share, or simply an ingredient to contribute to a collaborative cooking experience.
Do We Need A Theme Every Time?
No, but themes can help keep people engaged and spark conversation.
While having a theme is never required for any supper club meeting, I do think they help people with decision fatigue and help encourage conversation as people gather and share what they brought and their experience of making it with the group.
Is Supper Club For Families?
1000% Yes. Supper clubs are the perfect social gathering for parents with young kids.
While you can certainly choose to host an adult-only supper club, supper clubs are extremely well suited for hosting friends with kids at home. We’ve found the only two modifications we end up making to the evening is to always remember to provide a kid friendly food option on any theme night that has less familiar foods available, and to plan to eat dinner around 5pm so everyone can get their kids home and in bed by 8pm.
Final Thoughts On Starting A Monthly Supper Club With Your Friends
As a first-time parent still in the trenches of toddlerhood, life can start to feel very small. It can feel isolating and incredibly lonely watching your friends go on adventures, eat dinner at fancy restaurants, or dance at parties late into the night while you’re home juggling feeding schedules, nap schedules, and eventually being held prisoner by bedtime.
The world’s answer to this is usually “get a babysitter” or “leave the kids with your partner” and go live your life and fill your cup.
But I like my spouse, and I like my kid. What I truly want is a way to spend time with both of them alongside our friends. I want my friends to know my child and have them be part of their lives.
Supper club has been the most incredible gift to us in that way.
It’s given us a recurring, low-pressure way to spend time with the people we cherish. A standing date I can look forward to each month, hosted on a schedule that lets me give my kid a nap, feed them dinner on time, and still get home for bedtime (while also seeing my friends, filling my cup, connecting deeply, and eating really, really good food on par with any fancy restaurant).
So yeah, I’d say that qualifies as pretty life-changing.
But enough about me. What about you?
Have you started a supper club with your friends? What have been your favorite themes? I want to hear everything in the comments below.
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