If you have friends who frequently host multi-course dinner parties where they serve meat raised and slaughtered in their backyard, home-brewed beer, and vegetables from their garden that they pickled last August, good for you.
Everyone else, buy your way into what promises to be either an intimate semi-private dining experience attended by your future best friends or a bourgeois gathering of food dorks.
The Underground Food Collective is hosting three dinner parties in Brooklyn this weekend (the exact location is kept secret until a week before the event) in celebration of a winter that is beginning to feel like the next Ice Age. But, if there is a group better-equipped to actually enjoy this time of the year, it is the chefs, farmers and food-lovers of the Wisconsin-based Food Collective.
For $65, expect to enjoy home-cooked seasonal fare like hearty root vegetables, all things preserved, and of course, lots of meat--provided by hipster-butcher Tom Mylan of the The Meat Hook, a full-service butcher shop that specializes in local, heritage breeds fed on organic grass and mother's milk. Their sausage--made fresh daily-- ranges from "classy" red wine and rosemary to the "trashy" bacon-cheeseburger.
For better or worse, getting cozy with the growers and makers of your meal is what the now wildly popular locavore movement is all about. Indeed, Julie Powell, of Julie and Julia fame, recently lamented the celebrity status bestowed upon today's butchers during a discussion with fellow food bloggers at the Housing Works Bookstore, saying "I find it really annoying that Tom Mylan has groupies" (guess she wanted to be the only one?).
Local and home-brewed beer will be served at the dinner, but guests are also encouraged to bring their own bottle of booze--to share, of course. And to all those butcher-loving hipsters, who simply swoon at the site of a slaughtered swine, the butcher himself may or may not be there.
January 14, 15 and 17 at 7:30pm.
Reserve your spot here.
