Angela's Story

My name is Angela, and I'm a Vietnamese-American girl in London who's determined to infect others with my obsession for southern comfort food.  My passion for Americana fare can be traced back to my dad, who, while attending The University of Nebraska in the Midwest (having been transplanted straight from Vietnam), developed quite a predilection for red meat, Budweiser, and the Corn Huskers (a University football team). My mom's fondest memory of her first years in the US (after her family had managed to escape from vietnam), was when my dad took them all out for a fried-chicken meal. They were right impressed having spent their entire lives probably eating rice and a modest amount of steamed vegetables everyday. As for me, growing up, despite being surrounded by limitless variation of ethnic cuisine, my favorite meal was simply anything grilled paired with a generous heap of mashed potatoes.  

Just over the last couple years, having been living in New York, my culinary mecca, I've observed how increasingly cool it is to crave American comfort food.  Maybe because it completes the whole image of hipster camp -- along with beards, mounted deer heads, alt-country music, flannels, PBRs, and incest (just kidding). Whatever.... I don't really care why it's cool, I'm just happy I can admit I eat red meat again.  But then again, this ain't your mama's meatloaf,  what we're seeing is comfort food being pushed outside of it's own comfort zone -- take, for example, my favorites: the Waverly Inn's Truffled Mac n' Cheese, Bonchon's Korean fried chicken, Momofuku's cereal-milk milkshake, Brooklyn Star's Dr. Pepper BBQ Ribs, or Dynamo's maple apple-bacon doughnut.  If anything, these renditions on the classics,  by incorporating a wide inspiration of flavors, are an indication that American food deserves some wide-spread international recognition.  It deserves to party on your palate.  

What better place to celebrate unconventional comfort food than in the comfort of someone else's home?  Cue: Afterschool Special, an underground dinner party where folks arrive, leave their food pretensions and prejudices at the door, socialize and indulge in intrinsically satisfying food that won't cost you a week of home-packed sandwiches. Imagine one part prohibition-era speakeasy, one part Grandma's living room (bless her county-winning cherry pie!), one part surrealist student studio. In the true vein of alt-comfort cuisine, we're going to welcome you wholeheartedly into our warm Hackney home, however surprising you with flavors both familiar yet strange.  I'll be the first to admit that I'm no formally-trained chef, just someone with years of service jobs and food experimentation under her belt.  just someone who everyone knows as unhealthily food-obsessed. 

So why risk running an illegal restaurant, especially if it could mean getting deported back to New York? To answer, I just find underground restaurant clubs so fascinatingly relevant to what's happening around us today.  Having studied digital culture, and the relationship between technology and society at NYU, I can easily see how underground restaurant clubs are thriving while Michelin star restaurant are struggling to survive.  The success of such illegitimate establishments suggest a changing consumer mentality and a democratization of all forms of production, bringing forth the rise of the amateur (to many people's dismay).  I'm all for it.  A backlash against stale, traditional businesses and corporations has been propelled by social-networking technologies such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs, where word-of-mouth travels at the light of speed, encouraging us all to explore new and different things.  All these things are a response to a crescendoing consumer demand for transparency, uniqueness and immediacy.  Having observed, through various jobs, how media and music companies are transitioning successfully into the digital age, I find it absolutely thrilling to take part in this evolution within the restaurant culture.  

So, back to basics, for a £15 minimum donation, you'll receive a unique dining experience complete with 3-4 wholesome, satisfying courses in an intimate (a maximum of 10 selected guests per night), communal setting where we encourage people to just hang out, knock back a few brew-skis and listen to Neil Young... in true American fashion.