Text by Eunica Escalante
Images by Desmond Centro
Supper clubs, an American culinary tradition dating back to the 1930s, have long blended gastronomy and community, offering a space where meals become shared experiences. Prolific across the Midwest, supper club establishments reached their zenith in the mid-20th century, before the rise of chain restaurants led to their decline. In recent years, driven by a desire for connection in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, supper clubs are en vogue once again. Unlike the supper clubs of old, however, many of these new iterations take the concept beyond the restaurant, transforming homes, studios, and unconventional spaces into temporary dining rooms. Here, we experience three distinct Honolulu supper clubs—traveling from a bamboo forest in Pālolo to a modernist home in Hawai‘i Kai to a concept space in Kaka‘ako—where diners are invited to explore culture, artistry, and connection, one carefully plated bite at a time.
Follows the Wai
Dinner was in the middle of a bamboo forest deep in Pālolo Valley. The only sign we’d arrived—and not lost ourselves in the valley’s maze—was a small sticker on the wooden gate, marked with the emblem of our host and chef, Yuda Abitbol. Hiking down sinuous steps, we reached a clearing where two small, rustic cabins sat. Abitbol padded barefoot onto the deck, ushering us in with a smile. He had lived here for a year, in a home that felt plucked from his daydreams. The property’s bohemian asceticism—hemmed in by wilderness; room enough for a bedroom and a kitchen-cum-dining room—certainly aligns with Abitbol’s own, a chef who has distinguished himself from the local culinary scene with his wild-to-table philosophy, wherein every meal is comprised of ingredients he has personally sourced from the wild. Since 2021, Abitbol has run Follows the Wai, a dining and foraging project that takes this ethos to curious diners across the islands.
“[The experience is] based off storytelling,” he explained. “That intimacy, that feeling of being directly connected to the ingredient.” At his private dinners, nearly every ingredient is foraged, hunted, or grown by Abitbol. This evening, thin sashimi of raw mū (bigeye emperor fish), speared days before by a friend, rested on a purée of local mango and foraged makrut leaves. A tartare of Moloka‘i venison and ‘ākulikuli, a native succulent known for its salty leaves, was paired with a loaf of sourdough from the craft bakery Breadshop on Wai‘alae Avenue. A red wine bourguignon featured wild mouflon ram, hunted by Abitbol along the slopes of Maunakea, where the invasive species roams unchecked. It’s all in service to his radical approach to sustainable cuisine, proving that flavorful food can be even more thrilling when using resources naturally found in the islands.
One cannot simply sign up for a Follows the Wai dinner. The vetting process includes a conversation with Abitbol beforehand, during which he explores your intentions for participating in the meal. If compatible, you’ll be invited to join the table. It may seem strange to some, needing to get through a quasi-job interview to partake in a dinner. For Abitbol, it’s a non-negotiable. Understanding the journey of each ingredient and the energy exchanged at the table is central to the Follows the Wai experience. “That is a huge part of the dinner,” Abitbol said, “stopping everything, getting the intention, like ‘why are we here?’ These animals were alive before I killed them. There was an exchange of energy, and now that energy is going to come to you.”
Table for Twelve
The guests of Table for Twelve arrived at the artist Nicole Parente-Lopez’s modernist Hawai‘i Kai home balancing casserole dishes and covered pots. A chorus of greetings and what-did-you-make’s erupted with each new entrance. Before long, Parente-Lopez’s kitchen island was a scatter of home-cooked dishes. Handwritten slips of neon pink paper, taped in front of each, announced their offerings: Gloria’s chile colorado, mole-spiced guajillo jam, quesadillas las mejores, all from the month’s cookbook, Salsa Daddy: Dip Your Way Into Mexican Cooking by Rick Martinez. The dinner’s dozen attendees, a group of twenty- and thirty-somethings across vastly different professional fields, included a recent post-grad architect, the owner of an interior design store, and an emergency management officer for the city of Honolulu. What united them, though, is a love for sharing a meal.
Since July 2024, Table for Twelve co-founders Parente-Lopez and event curator Kristine Pontecha have hosted a monthly dinner centered around a cookbook whose cuisine or author has captured their interest. The conceit may seem simple: Bring a dish, fill a plate, enjoy small talk. Yet, for Parente-Lopez and Pontecha, gathering around the dinner table has always carried more significance than that. Family meals shaped both of their childhoods. The compulsory Sunday dinners of Parente-Lopez’s Italian American household cultivated a lifelong love for hosting and home cooking. For Pontecha, food became a universal language, bridging the generational and linguistic divides of her Filipino American upbringing. In 2024, a year after Parente-Lopez had relocated to Hawai‘i and with the pandemic’s isolating effects still lingering, cooking and sharing meals became their instinctive remedy for connection.
There’s something inherently vulnerable about cooking a meal for someone. Will they like it? Did I follow the recipe well enough? Those anxieties set Table for Twelve apart from other supper clubs, where guests are served a prix fixe meal. “The table levels the playing field,” Parente-Lopez said. “Everyone who’s there has brought something to that table. That helps people feel very comfortable to just open up.”
As dinner wore on, stories unfolded alongside the dishes: a grandmother’s tip, a kitchen mishap turned triumph, a flavor discovered on a trip long ago. Each bite became a small revelation, a thread connecting strangers. For Parente-Lopez and Pontecha, that is the magic of their club. Each carefully prepared bite is a portal, connecting across culture, experience, and background. In that Hawai‘i Kai home, the world felt smaller, warmer, infinitely more connected—one dish at a time.
Kristine Pontecha is currently employed by NMG Network, the publisher for Violet. This story was reported independently.
Hungry Fish
One summer evening in 2025, as the crowd of weekend regulars drifted out of Fishcake with their usual mix of décor finds, handmade ceramics, and bites from its pop-up eatery, Janice Lee and Robynne Capili were already readying the warehouse-turned-concept space for its night shift. A dining table and cluster of bistro tables, enough to seat 24 guests, were arranged in the center of what served as the furniture showroom by day. Covers of Joe Hisaishi’s famous scores for Studio Ghibli films filtered through the speakers overhead. At the café counter by the entrance, where Fishcake’s rotating cast of burgeoning chefs and indie eateries typically set up shop, chef Dayton Cagaoan unpacked the evening’s courses: homemade crispy rice cakes topped generously with a mountain of salmon ikura and microgreens; pan-seared scallops sitting atop a bed of furikake risotto; and sous-vide char siu pork shoulder bathed in a liliko‘i hoisin glaze. There would be seven courses in all, everything an homage to the animated classic, Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away.
It was the latest edition of Hungry Fish, a dinner series that transforms Fishcake into a monthly culinary showcase. The dinners began in September 2024, initially as a one-off fundraiser for the survivors of the Lahaina wildfire. Showroom manager Lee found that the event perfectly embodied the space’s fusion of creativity and community. Since then, Fishcake has held a Hungry Fish dinner every month, each centered around a local culinary talent: from a hybrid omakase of sushi and ramen with chef Yuji Haraguchi to a dinner showcasing cuts of lamb grilled in a kamado smoker on-site by Dennis Suyeoka. The Spirited Away dinner is the first in a new iteration titled Cinematic Dinners, an experience that sits at the “intersection of art and cuisine,” Lee said, adding that it’s what makes this series so exciting. She’s not wrong, if the dinner’s two-night seatings—both of which promptly sold out—are any indication.
