Standing on the street everything looks completely normal as guests arrive for a dinner party at a house near Tunbridge Wells. However, on the inside it is not your typical dinner party. In fact it’s illegal. Some call them supper clubs, others underground restaurants, but essentially you’re secretly dining in someone else’s home and paying for it.
Hari Covert opened the first one in Kent and since then they’ve grown in popularity across the region. “It was really done as a bit of a two fingers up to somebody else to prove to them that using Facebook and Twitter was the way forward in terms of marketing their business.”
Within three days of the website going live Hari had his first booking and since then his popularity has soared. He puts this success down to the use of social media. He said: “It has been phenomenal. Twitter in particular, I’ve got now, I think over 500-odd followers in a little over a year. I look for nearby tweets from people and then start following those people and then because of the etiquette of Twitter they start following you back and start getting a little bit curious. Their curiosity gets the better of them and they start thinking well who is Hari Covert?”
However, he doesn’t believe that he can keep his identity secret forever and that eventually someone will “grass him up” to the council, but he remains determined to continue regardless of council intervention. He added: “Life is too short to worry about it. I would stop doing it here in my own home and I would find other venues for it.”
“The whole aspect of it being illegal, yeah it’s all a bit of fun, and I love it. I do like that sort of on the edge idea.”
To keep his identity secret Hari uses a pseudonym name and most never learn his real name. Originally his neighbours didn’t even know about the restaurant.
“One of my neighbours found out through having read an article in a BBC Good Food magazine about the underground restaurant movement. They thought it sounded interesting and they searched underground restaurants in Kent on Google. They found my website and were looking at the pictures and thought ‘I recognise that’ and then I get this email from them saying do you do takeaways through the hedge? That was highly amusing from our point of view. They had no idea that we had a restaurant; they just thought we had regular dinner parties.”
Since Hari’s restaurant more have opened in Kent and Bromley is now home to the only gluten-free underground restaurant, Annie’s Supper Club.
The owner, Annie, opened the restaurant due to the lack of choice available for people who need gluten-free diets. She has been cooking such food for her family for four years after two of her four children were diagnosed as autistic. Her father was then diagnosed as having Celiac disease and died as a result of a late diagnosis. Following that the whole family got tested and they discovered that her brother and another of her children were also carrying the disease.
“I realised how impossible it was to go anywhere gluten free. We just couldn’t go out as a family to eat. And a lot of friends had been saying you really ought to have a restaurant. The two ideas kind of merged and by random chance I saw someone talking about an underground restaurant on the internet and I thought that’s something I could do. So we decided to set up Annie’s and twice a month we have a dinner and all of our food is 100% gluten free.”
However, Annie doesn’t believe that what she’s doing is illegal. “It’s not that we’re operating against law, we’re operating where there isn’t a law and taking advantage of what’s not there. We’re not selling food, we ask for a donation at the end of the meal towards the food they’ve enjoyed. So it’s sort of a step up from having a dinner party. It’s like having a bunch of friends round but asking them to pay for the meal.”
Albeit, the Food Standards Agency said such businesses would likely be classed as a food business. Bradley Smythe of the agency said: “If it is a food business, the activity will come under the food hygiene legislation and will need to be registered with the local authority.”
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