Great Taste in Friends

You’d like to schmooze with good friends over fabulous food, but that trendy little spot you had in mind is so noisy that conversation is impossible.

So is the bill.

In fact, so is the evening, because your good friends aren’t always available when you happen to feel like stepping out.

Kathi and Dan Clower and the three other couples in their gourmet dining group have been there. That’s why they formed a club six years ago, and they’ve been happily eating ever since.

Every six or eight weeks, the group samples fare as ritzy as oysters Rockefeller or as stick-to-the-ribs as grilled steak stuffed with three kinds of mushrooms. And there’s no question about how large a tip to leave; they dine at each other’s homes.

“I can’t imagine this coming to an end,” Kathi Clower said. “You come and relax, stay as long as you like, without feeling like you have to talk over the crowd.”

In the Clowers’ group, the host and hostess pick the theme for the meal--Italian, Greek or maybe something more adventurous, like Russian--and prepare all the food. Guests bring the wine suggested by the hosts, and lots of it--two bottles per couple.

“We’re wine nuts,” she said of the eclectic group that includes an artist, a fire captain, and--not that gourmet cooking is rocket science--a rocket scientist.

The dinners are equal-opportunity events. It’s not just the women who scour cooking magazines for recipes and whip them up, with the men maybe offering to toss a salad.

This year the husbands took turns organizing meals and preparing the food. Dan Clower, a Ventura optometrist, put together an eye-popping (and palate-pleasing) spread that included steak (the recipe came from an article on great steakhouses), twice-baked potato with jalapeno peppers, and spinach salad with poppy-seed dressing.

Gourmet groups are not new. They flourished during the late 1970s and early ‘80s, according to Bon Appetit magazine executive editor Barbara Fairchild.

“It started with the baby boomers as they started getting into cooking and entertaining,” Fairchild said. “Everyone was buying food processors and pasta machines. It was a way to show off what they’d learned.”

Cooking styles have changed since then. Now it’s more casual; stoneware has replaced formal china. Supermarkets now sell ready-made epicurean delights like pate and red pepper pasta. And men are just as likely to be the ones stir-frying the Chinese pea pods.

The trend lately is potluck, Fairchild said, but not the potluck of Tupperware and green bean casseroles.

“It’s beyond potluck--it’s more upscale,” Fairchild said. It’s planned better, coordinated with other dishes and presented with flair.

Suzanne Schechter is part of a 12-member potluck group that started last spring. They get together every two months for a dinner centered around a theme.

“I think it’s a good idea--you don’t see people if you don’t have some kind of thing like that,” said Schechter, an artist who serves on the board of the Carnegie Cultural Arts Center in Oxnard.

The first dinner featured fruits and nuts, incorporated into such dishes as cashew chicken and cherry soup. For the latest one, at Schechter’s Oxnard home, the theme was summer. She barbecued chicken, and guests brought dishes such as potato salad.

“The dinner was good, but the conversation was even more interesting,” she said. The group is a mix of couples and singles, but nearly all have an interest in art.

You don’t have to be a whiz with a food processor to fit into one of these gourmet groups. The successful groups attract just the right mix of personalities, long-timers say.

For longevity, few can match the success of the group to which Mickey Caplan and her husband have belonged for 35 years.

“It’s quite remarkable,” said Caplan, who lives in Sherman Oaks and has known the other four couples since high school. Several of them later became teachers, and after a dinner out together they decided they could do it cheaper--and better--at home.

They meet every three months, ranging as far as Newport Beach. The hosts pick the theme and menu, prepare the entree and buy the wine. They dole out recipes to the others, who schlep the soup, appetizers, salad and dessert to the hosting couple’s home.

“We went through foreign countries, A to Z,” she said. “We ran out of countries!”

For one meal, they even printed the menu in a leather-bound holder, describing the dishes in eloquent terms.

They’ve had flops too. One dinner landed on the floor. “We all piled in the car and went out to some joint,” Caplan said.

Nancy Nasalroad and her husband, who live in Santa Paula, are part of a dining group that has weathered 14 years of collective eating. They’ve watched each other’s children grow up, seen one couple through a divorce, and said goodbye to another couple who dropped out.

“You have to be real compatible,” said Nancy Nasalroad.

Kathy Strand of Ventura is part of the same group. “We feel a bond toward each other,” she said. “It’s the highlight of our social life--it is our social life.”

The four couples are so committed that they sit down with a calendar a year in advance to pick dining dates six weeks apart. They even take trips together--a houseboat cruise on Lake Mead, a getaway to Catalina.

But eating, and eating well--forget counting calories--is what brings them together. They share the dinner preparations, similar to Caplan’s group. Somehow it all comes together--or doesn’t.

There was the time one couple decided to serve up a 15-pound tuna. “Someone told them it would take a half-hour to cook,” Strand said. It wasn’t ready until nearly midnight, and by then one guest was asleep on the floor. Another soon nodded off at the table.

The Japanese dinner with sushi fell flat. “Some people refused to eat raw fish,” she said. Cucumber soup was another loser. “I absolutely hated it,” she said. Almond soup was bitter. But cream of pistachio soup was a winner. “It was absolutely delicious; I never would have tried it.”

And the Napoleons for one dessert turned out to be a huge, costly undertaking. By the time the thin pastry dough, custard (with real vanilla beans and cream) and strawberry sauce had come together, it was a $30 extravaganza.

Some gourmet groups tally expenses and split the cost evenly, but it seems most don’t. They figure that it evens out over many meals. In the Clowers’ group, the guests bring only wine, but the bottles are in the $10-$30 range. In spite of the sometimes hefty cost that goes into these meals, most everyone feels it’s cheaper than fine restaurant dining--and perhaps better tasting.

It’s more casual, more intimate and often more fun. The Clowers’ group brought in a belly dancer when the cuisine was Greek. They plopped on the floor in traditional Japanese attire for the Japanese dinner.

Strand’s bunch has done mystery dinners, dressing as murder suspects on an imaginary cruise ship. For New Year’s, they got dolled up in tuxedos and gowns. They’ve come in costumes for a Halloween dinner, featuring orange and black food, of course. Once for St. Patrick’s Day, they cooked only green food, starting with green pasta soup.

In Santa Barbara, Bette Stuebing and her husband, Dick, have been part of a big, highly organized gourmet group for 20 years. With 24 members, they can’t all eat together. So on dinner nights they break into groups of eight and go to three homes and eat identical meals.

The couples rotate so they don’t sit down with the same people each night. Sometimes they do a picnic, a winery tour, and every year they do a clam bake on the beach.

They plan the four dinner dates a year in advance at a party, where they also vote on the cuisine. (Every year they do a French dinner by popular demand.) The three hosting couples plan the menu for each meal, sending recipes to guests--two dishes per couple.

Despite the formality, it’s not supposed to be a nerve-racking experience, according to Stuebing.

“If what you make doesn’t turn out great, it’s not your fault,” she said. “The recipe may be lousy.”