A Supper Club That’s A Work Of Art

GOOD TIMES: As an ice-breaker, we had to ferret out the name of the famous artist pinned to our back. Our hosts were kind enough to keep it in the Art for Dummies realm of Van Gogh and O’Keeffe. (Below) Lori having fun. Mark and me. Katherine, seen furiously coloring the canvas during our after-dinner activity: a group painting.

Gourmet Nights
Four Dallas couples host a supper club that’s a work of art.

When Pam and Mark Denesuk asked us to be a guest couple at their supper club, my husband and I were thrilled. We’d heard about the group’s escapades: the Valentine’s dinner, where the invitation arrived in a lingerie box and the guys got Viagra pills as party favors; the sunrise supper, when they all wore pajamas and dined on souff’s; and the spa dinner, which included pedicures, manicures, and massages for all. The formal invitation we received hinted at yet another remarkable evening; it was a hand-painted card titled, The Art of Food, with a menu of selections from the Dallas Museum of Art cookbook, The Artful Table.

Pam listed the other guests as Katherine Baronet, Tom and Lori Reisenbichler, Rick and Nancy Rome, and our hosts, Sam and Catherine Basharkhah. She also explained how the group got together: when Pam, an aspiring chef and retired lawyer-turned-carpool-mom and Mark, an amateur hockey player who runs a large ad agency, relocated to Dallas five years ago, they wanted to find people who shared their love of travel, food, and fine wine.

They met Lori and Tom through their children at Greenhill School. Lori, an art technology CEO, and Tom, a director of an architectural design firm, introduced them to two other couples, who were longtime friends and business associates. Enter Sam, an ex SMU soccer star who owns an engineering firm, and his wife Catherine, a ceramist, along with Rick, an engineering exec and vintage-car collector, and his wife Nancy, a partner in an interior design firm. Voil , an artistically eclectic mix, perfect for a bimonthly dinner club. Each evening, they invite two guest couples to keep things fresh and interesting. 

Interesting doesn’t even begin to describe the location for this supper club. We were wowed as soon as we stepped in the door. Catherine and Sam live in an Uptown space above his engineering company, and it is trs loft. Filled with Catherine’s ceramics and paintings mixed with life-sized African wooden warriors, the occasional vibrant-red or turquoise wall, and sleek, contemporary furniture, it is the ideal space for a party like this.

To get everyone mingling right away, Pam starts the evening with a classic ice-breaker: she pins a scan of a famous artist’s painting to each of our backs. You have to guess which artist you are by asking yes or no questions, and you can’t look in the mirror to cheat, she says. (I look around for said mirror immediately, since I know very little about art.) I gulp and take a crack at it.

Am I a man?

Yes.

Am I crazy?

No.

ON THE MENU: Pulling all of the recipes from the DMA’s The Artful Table was a great stroke. (Below) From baked chèvre to Tolouse-Lautrec cake, the most delicious chocolate cake in human history, we feasted in style.

Still alive?

No.

Italian?

No.

French?

Yes.

Impressionist? Monet?

You’re right! That was amazing, Catherine says.

Monet is the only artist she knows, says my husband. Gee, thanks, dear.

The table itself is a work of art. A Henry Moore-esque nude bronze bookended by red tulips reclines on a white cloth dotted with votives. Black lacquer chairs surround the table. Then an unusual yin-yang thing: Pam and Catherine set the contemporary table with black and white Spode pottery featuring 1800s farm scenes. Jeweled frames containing miniature paintings serve as place cards and party favors.

We dine on a feast of baked chvre with tomatoes and olives, soup au Pistou, Vintner’s salad, veal-and-spinach-stuffed tenderloin, herbed asparagus, heavenly potatoes, and a sinfully delicious chocolate fudge dessert in a raspberry and vanilla crème sauce (a pound of chocolate in an 8-inch pan, according to Nancy; see recipe below).

BLACK AND WHITE CHIC: The table was set in black and white, which perfectly punctuated the vivid reds and turquoises in Catherine and Sam’s loft space.

Now, it’s time to begin our after-dinner game, Catherine says as we adjourn to the turquoise sofa and red chairs. We’re going to create a progressive drawing. It will be mixed media, with oil pastels and cattle markers. Be sure to wear a rubber glove because it’s kind of messy. Otherwise, anything goes. She shepherds us through drawing numbers for positions. Mark will go first.

I don’t draw, he says, stepping up to the blank canvas. If this were my office, I’d have a staff of people who would do this for me. Illustrating his point, he rips off his rubber glove and glues it on the canvas, leaving a questionable finger pointing upward. He takes a moment to contemplate his work. Inspired, he boasts.

Sam owes me a buck, shouts Pam. I knew that Mark would do that!

We each take our stab at creative genius, eventually changing the glove’s fingers to a peace sign, adding red fingernails, and finally manipulating it into a formless glob, a move which Mark brands censorship.

Colors are splashed on the canvas in bold strokes, creating geometric shapes, squiggly borders, flower and animal shapes, and phrases such as love me and go run that are inevitably colored over by the next artist. Throughout the creation of our graffiti masterpiece, we never stop talking “or laughing. Which is, I suppose, the mark of a great gourmet night.

	MASTERPIECE: The results of our evening together: Untitled, an original mixed-media work.	FRAMED: Our hostess Catherine (above) selected paintings representative of each guest (mine, appropriately enough, was a pregnant nude) and then scanned and framed them to serve as place cards and party favors.

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Toulouse-Lautrec Cake
Serves 8 to 10

 1   pound semisweet chocolate
10  tablespoons (1 1/4 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
 4   eggs, separated
 1   tablespoon flour
 1   tablespoon sugar

Butter bottoms and sides of 8-inch springform pan. Place baking parchment, cut to size, on bottom of pan, and butter it, too. Melt chocolate and stir in butter gradually. Cool slightly. Beat egg yolks 5 to 7 minutes, until pale yellow. Stir in flour. Add yolk mixture to chocolate. Beat egg whites until frothy. Gradually add sugar and beat until whites form firm but not stiff peaks. Do not over-beat. Gently fold egg whites into chocolate mixture until combined. Pour into prepared pan and bake at 425 degrees for 20 minutes. (Cake will look underdone.) Chill well for several hours or overnight. When chilled, remove ring from pan and invert cake onto serving plate.

From The Artful Table ($35), available at www.dm-art.org. Reprinted with permission.

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One of Catherine’s own decorative art pieces, Heads Are Going To Roll.

A Gourmet Club How-To
Tips and tricks for creating your own memorable evening with friends.

Keep the core group small (four or five couples), so the hosts can invite a guest couple to keep the group interesting. A small group also keeps food preparation from being too overwhelming.

Plan a menu that matches the season, or base it on a favorite foreign city or historical event. Pick dishes that can be prepared ahead, with nothing too labor intensive at the house. Nobody wants to be stuck in the kitchen while everyone else mingles.

Send an invitation (with menu) two weeks prior to the dinner to give each couple ample time to pick and prepare the course they’d like to bring.

Choose party favors and decorations to match the theme. Don’t over-think it. A dinner in Paris theme with miniature Eiffel tower decorations and Parisian notecards as party favors is perfectly fine. For that same dinner, serve an after-dinner cheese course.

Plan an after-dinner activity or game. It can be silly, but keep it simple and fun, with time constraints so everyone gets home before the sitter’s fee breaks the bank.