Dai Due Supper Club

Jeanine shares her experience with the ultra-locally-sourced Dai Due Supper Club in Austin, Texas. Here's to good food and community!

Jack and I have been going to the Dai Due dinners (prounced die do-aay) for a few years now, and it’s something we really look forward to. I usually try to snag tickets once a year in the summertime for one of the seafood-themed dinners. (There are some obvious themes I can’t go to as a non-meat-eater — ie. “The Whole Hog” dinner).

The husband and wife team, Jesse Griffiths and Tamara Mayfield, take “local” to a crazy-person level (the good kind of crazy). While they set the dinner themes ahead of time, individual menu items aren’t decided until the last minute due to what’s immediately available. And every ingredient – down to the olive oil and the flour – are local. Seafood is from the Texas gulf “with a focus on “bycatch”, or overlooked and underutilized fish caught by fisherman seeking more well-known and marketable fish.”

But really, these dinners are just fun. It’s fun to sit at a big table and eat family style with total strangers who all have a common love of good food. Of course, if you get stuck next to someone uninteresting, you are stuck with them for 4 hours (and this is why I’ll never go on a cruise), but this particular night, we lucked out. On our right was an oddly fascinating couple who raises their own bees. On our left was a couple that brought extra bottles of wine and poured us theirs when we ran out of ours. Ah, community…

*top left image: Jody Horton, from Dai Due’s website

(other photos via our instagram feed)