The Abridged version:
- Supper clubs — ticketed, multicourse dinners cooked and served out of someone’s home — are having a moment in Sacramento and other cities.
- Good Wilma’s serves big shared dishes for 16; Dinner with Old Friends offers an individually plated, seven-course menu for 12.
- The small-scale dinners are more intimate and social than traditional restaurant dining rooms.
There’s a real appetite for supper clubs in Sacramento right now, and the format looks a bit different than a night out at a restaurant.
A supper club is a ticketed, multicourse dinner cooked and served out of someone’s own home, usually once a month, for a small group of guests. Industry veterans around the city, from fine dining chefs to cheesemongers, have started opening their own living rooms to diners.
The Miami Herald reported that supper clubs are becoming one of the most meaningful ways people are rebuilding community, citing record-high loneliness rates. The San Francisco Standard found the same shift closer to home, pointing to a Bay Area full of isolated food lovers craving connection over a shared table.
Two of the more established supper clubs in Sacramento right now take almost opposite approaches to that idea. Good Wilma’s is a wine-filled dinner built around big shared plates, cooked by five friends out of an apartment. Dinner with Old Friends runs an individually plated course-by-course menu, led by a fine dining duo and backed by investors from the start. (Each has its own house dog mascot, Wilma at one, Mezcal at the other.)
Whichever style pulls you in, both aim to send guests home the same way: exchanging Instagram handles and having made friends they did not have three hours earlier.
How it started
Jasper Nahid and his fiancée Jessica Parsons run Good Wilma’s alongside Esther Kaminsky, Audrey Pardini and Malik Bynum, their friends in Sacramento’s food and beverage scene.
“We all realized that we loved food, and wanted to do something creatively, but not work a line cook position or a traditional restaurant back-of-house job,” Nahid said. “… Together we are the limbs of an octopus of one really talented chef.”
“We started hosting elaborate themed dinner parties for our friends, and our organization and development really stems from that,” Parsons said. The current version came together once close ones started flooding their DMs asking to come over.
Derek Sawyer and Yessenia Ochoa-Sawyer, a husband-and-wife team, got the idea for Dinner with Old Friends from an existing habit. They and their friends used to cook with each other once per month, switching the hosting home with each meal.
The name reflects what the couple wants every guest to feel by the end of a dinner.
“The whole idea about Old Friends is that you come in as a stranger, but you’re going to leave as a new friend at the end of it,” Ochoa-Sawyer said.
The format
At Good Wilma’s, guests start with a welcome cocktail and appetizers laid out on a table, giving them room to mingle before finding a seat wherever they like. The apartment’s living room turns into a run of four-top tables for the night, each set with a printed menu pairing every course with a wine.
“It was our kind of DIY style,” Nahid said. “We’re not trying to trick you into feeling like you’re in a restaurant.”
The structure of a Good Wilma’s menu stays the same: a soup, a raw cold course, a run of hot dishes, then dessert. But the dishes themselves change constantly.
This past summer’s menu ran from a sweet corn soup with saffron to a smoked trout churro with cherry mostarda, ending on a stone fruit karpatka (a Polish choux pastry cream cake).
The crew’s own history shows up throughout every now and then. A golden borscht (a beet soup) traces to Kaminsky’s Ukrainian heritage, a kuku sabzi (a Persian herb frittata) to Nahid’s own.
Dinner with Old Friends welcomes guests with bubbles and a few bites before they find a seat. The 12 seats split across two four-top tables, one in the living room and one in the dining room, plus four more at the counter. Diners bring their own wine; Sawyer tells them one or two bottles is plenty.
“Every single course, the music stops,” Sawyer said. “We give a brief description of why we put this on the menu, who the farmers are that we’re using.”
The menu changes seasonally. This past summer’s version ran from a “farmers bouquet” with three kinds of peas to a “Frito-less Frito pie” built on pork, chicharrónes and a Mexican-inspired slaw. Versions of Ochoa-Sawyer’s family recipes show up along the way, drawn from her father’s Mexican restaurant in Santa Rosa.
The price
At Dinner With Old Friends, a seat runs $175. Sawyer points to where the money goes first.
“You’re dealing with these farmers that aren’t making a ton of money off of us getting like four or five tomatoes that are perfect,” he said. “I don’t want to cheap out on that either.”
That same instinct extends to the equipment, too. Two investors covered startup costs such as chairs, linens and Gabriel-Glas wine glasses used at every dinner.
A seat at Good Wilma’s is $150, tip appreciated but not expected, and staff get paid roughly $40/hour. Twenty guests would be more profitable than 16, Nahid said, but the smaller number gives him more time with each person.
“I felt like I wasn’t able to interact with each guest as well,” he said of the larger count. “We’ve always broken even. We’ve never lost money doing it.”
The hospitality behind it
Sawyer’s hospitality journey started with watching his family cook in New Mexico. Ochoa-Sawyer, meanwhile, watched her family run their restaurant for years.
“I love taking care of people. I love getting to know people,” she said. “And (Sawyer is) so good at doing that with food and just making your belly feel like a hug inside.”
Sawyer sharpened his culinary chops in lead positions of Sacramento fine dining restaurants Hawks Public House, Allora and Localis before starting Old Friends. Ochoa-Sawyer, too, worked as Localis’ guest relations and events manager before landing at the Sellands Family Group, where she helps with catering and events.
Nahid and Parsons both cut their teeth as cheesemongers, Nahid at the Sacramento Natural Foods Co-op and Parsons at Taylor’s Market, where she’s now the wine department manager. Nahid went on to run the wine program at Ro Sham Beaux and now works alongside Bynum at Majka Pizzeria & Bakery.
“Since both Jasper and I have cheese and wine backgrounds, it’s fairly effortless pairing the wines with our food,” Parsons said. “But we’re also not very dogmatic about it, and really we’re just trying to show off wines that we really like.”
“You can be yourself here — we want you to be,” Bynum said. “And that can be hard to find when you go out to eat nowadays.”
What’s next?
Nahid’s long game is a brick-and-mortar version of Good Wilma’s idea, a small retail space built around an open pantry, wine hall and bar.
“I want to open a business where I can sit on a chair and just do that for the rest of my life and not have to retire and literally die there,” he said. “That’s the litmus test.”
Sawyer wants to take Dinner With Old Friends from once a month to once a week, reaching more people as a result. He’s also thinking about something more deliberate for regulars, where repeat guests could get first access to supplemental courses beyond the standard menu.
“I would love to be able to pour my soul into what the food could be with this,” he said.
The supper club trend
Suppers clubs are intrinsically more intimate than restaurant dining, Ochoa-Sawyer said. The seat count is a major reason why, Sawyer added.
“You’re literally doing something that you can’t do for 100 covers anymore. You’re doing it for just that 12,” he said.
Bynum, from Good Wilma’s side, points to the size of the city itself.
“It’s news to nobody that Sacramento is a small city,” he said. “Yearning for a dining experience that allows you to taste delicious new things and feel surprised time after time in such a disarming setting is a completely valid wish.”
Good Wilma’s
Location: Private residence, Sacramento (address shared upon booking)
Hours: Monthly, by invitation via DM
Price: $150 per seat, including wine pairings
Website: instagram.com/goodwilmas
Dietary notes: Menu is fixed each dinner; reach out to hosts about dietary needs before booking
Dinner With Old Friends
Location: Private residence, Sacramento (address shared upon booking)
Hours: Monthly, link released first of the month via newsletter
Price: $175 per seat
Website: https://dinnerwitholdfriends.com/
Dietary notes: Seasonal menu with limited substitutions; contact hosts before purchasing a ticket
