Eat Out Supperclub with Sara Baron-Goodman - No. 17
And a deep dive on queer food and community.
Welcome to Just Peachy! A newsletter full of interviews with women in food—friends, restauranteurs, writers, and creatives—all with unique, nerdy-passionate opinions on food. Occasionally, I include veg-forward recipes inspired by our chat. You can take those recipes and whip them up at home, sort of pretend you’re a part of it, eh? OR subscribe now and truly become a part of it…especially because today, there’s no recipe. By subscribing, you'll receive my biweekly newsletter on Tuesdays, straight to your inbox.
This week’s post features Sara Baron-Goodman, Rome-based journalist, cook, and co-creator of Eat Out Supperclub, a monthly event celebrating queer food and queer community in Rome. Together we talk about her transition from Montreal to Italy, tips for feeling “at home” in a new country, and how her passion for building community led to her queer supper club. As a queer person myself, I walked away from our conversation so incredibly inspired that I skipped over the other articles I had been saving to share this right away. You’re gonna love this one.
Sara grew up in the suburbs of Montreal, Canada. Coming from a Jewish household, food, and hospitality were a symbol of love. For Sara’s family, it was never about the food itself, but more about the community built over a meal. Her mom wanted everyone to feel nurtured, cared for, fed. Bordering on sending everyone home in a food coma, “if 12 people were coming for dinner, my mom would go to Costco and buy enough of each thing she was preparing for like 15 people, rather than, you know, assuming that not everyone's going to have an entire full-size portion of each.” When it comes to her ethos on food now, Sara gives a lot of credit to her family.
“Bringing people together around a dinner table is the best way to build relationships. That’s something I hold to be true even as the quality of the food becomes increasingly more significant in my work.”
Sara stayed in Montreal for her bachelor’s degree, studying journalism at Concordia, but remembers having the desire to explore from a young age. Travel gives Sara a certain zest for life. Since her first Euro trip at 18, her love for discovering other cultures, traditions, and foods has grown exponentially.
With her passion for travel at the forefront, Sara decided to pursue a Master’s in applied gastronomy in Pollenzo, Italy. At first, she intended to educate herself further to bulk up her food-writing skills but the more she learned about food, the more enthralled she became with cooking. To top it off, the University of Gastronomic Sciences had an amazingly progressive community that kept the spark alive. The university is associated with the Slow Food movement, a grassroots organization founded in Italy in 1989. It promotes traditional food preparation methods and locally sourced ingredients. Specifically, it “links the pleasure of food with a commitment to community and the environment.”
“Everyone had things like fermenting labs in their spare rooms or jars with mold growing on the table, purposefully. I had a friend who built a cheese cave out of cardboard boxes and tucked it away in his pantry. People had made DIY smokers and we'd go out into the woods to do whole goat roasts. It was seriously the wackiest, most amazing community.”
“I just really fell in love with the way that food can communicate identity.”
Sara’s thesis set out to study the increasing role queer food was playing in restaurants around the world. With New York as its epicenter, Sara held a series of interviews with restaurants in the city, including HAGS, Little Deb’s Oasis, Ursula, Agi's Counter, and Alex Koones, who runs Babetown, a Brooklyn-based queer supper club.
“It was interesting to see my suspicions confirmed—that independently of each other, all of these people had similar core values in terms of the way that they wanted to run their businesses. They shared similar views on what queerness meant to them in terms of an ethical value, beyond being a sexual identity. So now as I create my own space like that in Rome, I could draw inspiration from it and feel confident in the type of community I could create.”
Being from a progressive place like Montreal, Sara was surprised to find that the queer community in Rome wasn’t as transparent or fully formed as she’d imagined it to be. “There's a handful of venues, but they're not fantastic. There's one organization that puts on queer nights out, but they only hold a party once a month and it’s all very nightlife based. I was missing my community and there wasn’t anywhere to go to make friends that reflected my identity. Being fresh off of finishing my thesis, I was like, Okay. It doesn’t exist here, so I’m going to build it here.”
After meeting other queer women who were similarly disheartened by the lack of a queer community in Rome, Sara knew she was making the right move. “I hadn’t met that many people, but if they were all saying the same thing, then there must be more of us.” That's when she partnered up with friends and co-creators, Lea Ramaswamy (she/her), who is her co-cook, and Ciera Merli (they/them), who took on set design. Sara weaves queerness into every aspect of her community, down to the food that she serves. This meant creating menus that felt creative, un-stuffy, and served family style.
“For our first dinner, we used nice seasonal produce and did things to make Italian dishes feel brighter or even experimental. Like we did a Cacio e Pepe semifreddo but with Szechuan peppercorns, and we did a lamb that was braised in chocolate. The real winner of the menu was what we called a bread cake. It was a total accident. I made a sourdough loaf, but I had forgotten to score it, so it didn’t come out properly. In a quick attempt to salvage it, I sliced it horizontally and frosted it with a cold smoked butter, and a spicy peppercorn honey. I put the layers back together, sort of like a layer cake, and served the bread in wedges.”
Next up, Sara is looking forward to organizing a pride barbeque to celebrate in June. For creativity and to appeal to a bigger group, she’s thinking of making the menu mostly vegetarian. No guarantees, but her tentative plan includes a broccoli-bratwurst, chickpea salads, potato salads, and highlighting summer produce. Also on the docket is a 70’s horror-themed party, where she says she would want to lean into lots of kitschy decor—guess I know where my next vacation will be.
Outside of her supper clubs, Sara has been spending her time in a sort of double life, working in journalism Mondays-Thursdays, and catering on the weekends. Most recently, she catered an orgy. “It was an interesting experience. I never thought that would be something I had on my CV, but a gig’s a gig.” Taking place around the time of her first supper club, she provided them a similar menu including the chocolate braised lamb and a charred romanesco covered in pomegranate, mint, and tahini. She also included more finger foods, like mussels with a shallot mignonette and sour berries that grow nearby, which she covered with prosecco when serving it. “It was a bit of a showpiece. I tried my best to come up with a menu that felt light and fun, and hopefully a bit sexy—and I guess that did it for them because they seemed to have a great time.”
“Don’t be afraid to do the thing you actually want to do. There will always be distractions, there are always valid reasons to be busy. If there’s something you want to do, go for it. Just do it.”
For Sara, the idea of a freelance gig is nothing new, having spent the majority of her career in freelance writing. However, she explains that she’s learning all of the time, “being a newer cook, this does feel like a whole new experience. I think as women we’re taught to operate with imposter syndrome and that can affect our ability to go for or land gigs. But what I learned is that it’s all in the confidence. If you seem like you know what you’re talking about and you ask for what you deserve, the person more often than not will say yes.” Another piece of advice that she passes along is that the first step is always the scariest, the most expensive, and has the most obstacles. Get past this, and you’re one step closer to the work you’ve always wanted. For example, at her first supper club, she just barely broke even on the cost of supplies versus what she charged on tickets for the meal. Now she has all the table settings, and the main decor, and has walked away with a lot of lessons. Next time, they will turn a profit, and I believe that without a doubt.
Ah! Thank you again Sara for joining me to chat, your wisdom and bravery are inspiring, for me, but also for so many women with a passion for food. If you want to follow along with Sara and the amazing menus she’s creating for her queer supper club, you can find her on Instagram @eat.out.supperclub — I know I’ll be drooling from afar.