I have always been fascinated by the private supper that takes place at Morton's before the famed Vanity Fair Oscars party. It's the gold ticket of the season - a gathering of a mere 150 hand-picked pharaohs of Hollywood. The big pull isn't the food, the decor, the conversation or the company. It's the niggling little fact that you are not invited. Not you. Not me. Not anyone, actually, bar the exclusive coterie of super-somebodies deemed fit to grace the table this year. Some people would die, just die, for the invite. Others simply lose all sense of decorum - like parents trying to get their off-spring into church schools - and proffer bribes. One desperate saddo once called up the magazine and offered $300,000 for an invitation, proving the well-established First Law of Party Planning: let the plebs storm the gates, but never let 'em in.
Which is why the latest 'global dining phenomenon' is such a stroke of social, if not culinary, genius. According to industry moles, or 'guacamoles' as they are known in these elite circles, there's a whole undercover restaurant operation going on in New York, Berlin, Paris, even (some say) London: 'Occasional Supper Clubs', as they have been quaintly dubbed, are clandestine gatherings of food-fanciers. This is dining by stealth. The events - which spring up like mushrooms overnight and then fade back into the ether after the coffee and petits fours - take place in odd corners and crannies of a metropolis ... a 17th century apartment in Paris, a former Stasi headquarters in Berlin, somewhere deep in the foetid underbelly of Mexico City. The link between them all is the fact that you're not on the guest list, and you're not coming in. So fabulously 21st century! It's one step up from not being able to get a table at Nobu, or not being able to buy a Chloé Paddington bag. You just know that the knobs and noodles of London's fizzy social scene are going to be falling off their Jimmy Choos in the rush to get their hands on a Supper Club invite now that news of their existence has broken cover.
But don't ask me for directions. Even if I knew, I wouldn't tell the likes of you. Let's just agree that it exists, this secret diner, this hidden boite. To get in, you have to know someone who knows someone. You may hear about it via mobile phone, like those raves of the Eighties when you spent forlorn hours on the hard shoulder of the M45 near Dunchurch awaiting instructions. When you arrive at the rendezvous, you must know a code word or a complicated handshake or a five-digit Pin number; you and your hunger sneak up a fire escape; you scuttle down corridors and through confusingly similar doors. You eventually reach the inner sanctum, and only then can you have your tea.
The food, incidentally, might not even be that great - no, the great thing about it all is that you get to eat in the glorious company of strangers - a hand-picked hubbub of cultivated people who discuss art and life and the meaning of it all over a black truffe soufflé and a bottle of Petrus 75. I expect individuals occasionally declaim poetry or play the mandolin. Some may be wearing amusing hats. Who knows?
The emergence of the Occasional Supper Club is, perhaps, a backlash against the finicky food and colossal expense associated with contemporary fine dining. Many of today's Michelin-starred restaurants tend to specialise in what Le Figaro's restaurant critic, François Simon, calls a 'nervous' cuisine, 'oppressed, destined solely for other chefs and for the guide inspectors, over-technical, unnecessarily showy: demonstration cooking'. The Occasional Supper Club, by contrast, is intimate and mildly exciting, a bit of swash and buckle . Best of all, it's reserved for those in the know, which makes it about as desirable as you can get these days.
So, what really happens inside these speakeasies? Well, it's hard to tell. But my money's on the idea that you proceed past a pair of sphinx-like bouncers, through an unmarked door and into a bare, windowless room. Here, a spotty oik wearing a baseball cap and a name badge asks if you want fries with that. The thrill, you see, isn't in the eating. It's in the being there. Just ask the moguls at Morton's.