Imagine 25 potential strangers crammed (ahem, tastefully arranged) in the backyard of your very regular and ordinary rental home. You’ve frantically hung string lights, you just learned to leaf blow and there’s bug spray wafting in the wind. All of these potential strangers are looking at you to create a good time for them over a four-course dinner.
With so many eyes on you, do you start to sweat? Doubt yourself? Panic-think why on earth would anyone ever want to come to this? Well, that’s pretty much me every time I host my extremely baby, small-time supper club: Dinner at Kiki’s.
These anxiety- and joy-inducing “dinners’’ originally formed from my love of cooking and hosting friends. My enneagram Type 2 heart (reinforced from a young adult age by my older sister’s propensity to invite anyone and everyone over) gets a bit bigger every time I see friends from different backgrounds melding together.
Even if it’s just for the night, there’s something magical in the meshing of people over something as simple as dinner. I find this especially true in our lonelier, screen-filled, post-pandemmy age.
As the manager of Graft Wine Shop I have been very lucky to interact with and be surrounded by amazing wines. We have a concise menu of cheese and charcuterie, so one of the essential “buckets” of the sommelier profession, food pairing, doesn’t always get fulfilled there. Dinner at Kiki’s not only allows me to fulfill my hosting desire, it gives me a creative space to try out wine pairings and explore bottles that might not otherwise make sense for my 9-to-5 wine-o job.
There is a community of people that helps pull off Dinner at Kiki’s. I’ve been spoiled to have so many talented friends in Charleston who are willing to be partners or lend a hand. While I love to cook, Dinner at Kiki’s requires a seasoned chef willing to “genie in a bottle” a professional cooking operation into my small kitchen.
Chef Rod (currently the sous chef at local favorite Chubby Fish) can be credited with pushing me to continue this dinner series past the first one. (Shoutout to Jamie and Matt of Gingerbug who trusted me with the very first!) We’ve gone from an indoor dinner of ten people to an outdoor series of 25 to 30 people with custom playlists and menus — no small feat in a cobbled together little backyard.
Back to all those eyes on us in said backyard. In the moments of doubt right before a guest shows up and surveys your handiwork, when all the gremlins in your head are shouting “What the heck are you even doing?!” is the thought that this is perhaps what every small business dreamer must feel before they open the doors: vulnerable. You’ve put yourself out there for your small world to see.
Vulnerability isn’t something I’m particularly adept at in my personal life — looking at you ex-boyfriend trauma. (Jk. Jk. Sort of.) But with each Dinner at Kiki’s workshop, I’ve learned to settle into the feeling of stepping off the ledge into an empty frame. The empty space is scary, and it makes you pause, like that ball of air suspended in your stomach before the roller coaster drops. The good part comes when you realize you’ve made something that you catch yourself on and stretch out into, expanding with a pretty cool group of people into
a once-empty space
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