I used to be a lot better at meeting and talking to new people. I think we all were. It feels like the pandemic put our social skills through a high-spin washing-machine cycle, then whacked them in the dryer. We’re okay now – or getting there, at least – but we’re disoriented, tired and a little worse at interacting with one another than before.

We know what happens if you contract Covid-19, and its impacts on the economy have been well documented. But what spooks me is we won’t really know the full cultural and societal damage until long after the smoke clears. Loneliness was already considered a public-health challenge pre-pandemic – especially for young people. In a 2015 survey, one in eight Victorians aged between 16 and 25 reported feeling a “very high intensity of loneliness”. Add a pandemic to the mix – and all the post-lockdown awkwardness it’s causing – and what chances do young Aussies have for making meaningful new connections?

It’s a complicated modern problem, but Club Sup has a straightforward solution: it’s about bringing back the good old-fashioned dinner party.

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Club Sup is a supper club with two simple rules (neither of which are that rule): bring an open mind and an empty stomach, and your host will take care of the rest. It’s not pretending to be groundbreaking – similar clubs such as Sydney’s Arlo Communal and Melbourne’s Gruel Club have been a thing for yonks. But I’ve never seen one this well put-together. And unlike pop-up dinners (like those hosted by Ellie’s Table before she took over at Hope St Radio), which are generally about the food first and foremost, Club Sup is more about the people you meet over dinner (although the food is excellent – but I’ll get to that).

At a Club Sup dinner, you’ll sit down with a dozen or so strangers and likely stand up with as many new friends. It’s what I did at the two I attended. Both times I left dinner feeling stuffed and a little boozed, before we kicked on as a group to a nearby bar.

But it would never have happened if it weren’t for Covid. Last year, founder Sophie McIntyre was ready to leave Melbourne. She’d moved out of her apartment, packed her things and was crashing on a blow-up mattress in her mum’s study. She was finally going to realise her dream of moving to Italy.

“And that was the week that Italy blew up, Covid-wise,” she says. “And then the world kind of blew up.”

It ended up being an extended stint on the air mattress.

During the first lockdown, when we didn’t know whether to feel scared or bored, McIntyre was looking for distraction. “I couldn’t read a book … and I couldn’t watch anything serious. The only thing I could do was cook because I could follow a recipe and get lost. Living at my mum’s, we’d just hang out and cook – we got by through food.”

Italy was supposed to be a fresh start. After moving to Melbourne to study fashion, McIntyre got into a serious relationship, which she didn’t really socialise outside of. But when things ended, many of her closest friends had either moved to Europe or back home to Queensland. “I didn’t have that early twenties thing of meeting a whole heap of people,” she says. “For a good, formative chunk of my twenties I hadn’t made any friends or formed a good group.”

By lockdown 2.0 it was clear international borders weren’t opening anytime soon. And McIntyre had found a room in a share house, spending months inside with two complete strangers (and their partners). So, just like the first time around, she cooked.

“My housemates were kind of going a bit crazy and I could see that they needed a bookend at the end of each week,” McIntyre says. “So, I was like, ‘Right, let’s just have a big dinner on Saturday.’ And we used that as something to look forward to.”

The weekly dinner parties became elaborate dress-up occasions, with accompanying playlists and elaborate dishes (like the hardest-sounding ones you’d usually avoid in a cookbook). They were a full-on production – the kind that could only have happened on lockdown time. But they worked. By the time Melbourne was reopening, McIntyre and her housemates had bonded. “They had become the most important people in my life.”

So, spurred on by her housemates, McIntyre started Club Sup – to recreate those lavish lockdown dinners for young people coming out of a year of isolation, looking to make new connections. “If you’ve broken up with your boyfriend or your girlfriend, or you want a chill group of friends, or you want to see some new faces or just do something new, I wanted to create a space for that,” McIntyre says. “Loneliness is so bad for you – and I just refuse for Covid to be the final nail in the coffin of our social skills.”

There’s no better way to meet new people than over food, and Club Sup’s is no afterthought. Expect around three courses, but you’ll be grazing throughout the night – whether it’s on hors d’oeuvres such as fried olives or Ortiz anchovies, or just hearty hunks of Baker Bleu bread with mounds of whipped butter (which is deliberately scarce and placed just far enough away that you have to ask the person next to you to pass it down).

Each of McIntyre’s dinners are a one-woman show (well, two if you count her mum, Debbie, who does the dishes). She cooks course after course and makes sure your glass is always full of interesting wine – all the while introducing a dozen or so strangers to one another (and yes, cheesy ice-breaking games are involved).

Recipes are either from her food idols (such as American chef and Chez Panisse owner Alice Waters, and noted New York dinner-party host Laila Gohar) or ones she’s developed. You’re just as likely to get a take on Chez Panisse’s potato gratin as you are McIntyre’s spaghetti vongole with breadcrumbs.
Dessert could be a slice of King’s New York cake, a cocoa-meringue roulade by North Melbourne’s Beatrix, or even a straight-out-of-the-’90s cassata semifreddo.

Your glass, meanwhile, will always – always – be full. Wines are selected by the very talented Farah Sabet, who runs Melbourne-based online natural-wine shop Bud of Love. And then there’s the beautiful room: Collingwood events space Ma House with its ecru walls, ’70s furniture and snazzy candles. Factor all of that in, and it’s a little bit bewildering that a ticket to one of these dinners still costs less than a $100. Total steal.

Now I’m in my mid-twenties, this funny thing has started to happen that no one really warned me about: I’ve sort of stopped making friends. It wasn’t this abrupt, dramatic thing that I’ve been able to pinpoint. You just get set in your routine, I guess.

So, when I came across Club Sup on Instagram a few months ago, I hesitated, but I booked in to go on my own. Why not, right? I’m really glad I did: I’ve made friends I never would have met otherwise, become closer with acquaintances I bumped into there and already can’t wait to start throwing my own dinner parties.

Everyone misses how things used to be. But the unique social suffering of 2020 isn’t just about mourning what was, but mourning what wasn’t – it’s having full-tilt nostalgia for things that didn’t happen, places you didn’t go and people you didn’t meet. You can’t hit fast-forward and you can’t open those borders back up. But what you can do is put yourself back out there, while eating something delicious.

“Everyone took a moment to stop last year, and I think we all fell back in love with … the ceremony of [food],” says McIntyre.

“Food brings everyone together. It always does, and it always will.”

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clubsup.com.au