Philadelphia’s hottest new supper club is in a Drexel student’s apartment

One Sunday in March, I sat down to an elaborate, $85 multi-course tasting menu with dishes such as a quiveringly raw, sweet and silken Nantucket scallop that sparkled with Aji Amarillo; a spicy bite of jollof rice tucked into a folded blanket of a shiso leaf, resting upon a bed of dried black eyed peas; and a delicately crisped plantain gnocchi in a puddle of yellow curry, beset with tweezered-on tendrils of scallion strands. The pacing was thoughtful, each dish ceremoniously placed in front of me with a manicured story of how the ingredients were sourced from local farms and purveyors.

A yelp cut through the room. A sous chef had burned herself. It was the first indication since I sat down that I wasn’t in a restaurant trying to evoke a cozy living room vibe, but in a Drexel University student’s actual apartment, the crew cooking just steps away from a dining room table that had been foraged from Facebook Marketplace.

Ocho Supper Club is the venture of RJ Smith, 20, a quiet, serious culinary student and native of the Bay Area who has cooked professionally since his mid-teens and has had stints in multiple Michelin-starred restaurants. The supper club, which interprets Afro-Caribbean cuisine through a fine dining lens, is named for “the city of Ocho Rios, which had the largest impact on me,” Smith said. “I was 16 when I went to Jamaica for the first time. When I was growing up I had a lot of exposure to the culture through my family, being Afro-Caribbean. But when I spent time in Jamaica, it was transformative to me.”

When Smith was 15, during the height of the pandemic, he started a meal-delivery service, prepping meals for up to a hundred clients and selling them over Facebook. After a first job at a small Italian restaurant in Oakland, he landed at the two-Michelin-starred contemporary Mexican restaurant Californios by stopping one of their chefs during a market run and asking to spend a day in the kitchen. From 2022 to 2023, he worked his way up from early morning prep cook, putting in hours before his high school classes, to chef de partie, running the cold dish station.

Californios, Smith said, taught him the discipline and creativity that define world-class dining. It also opened doors: A former co-worker there invited him to stage — essentially, work an unpaid internship, common in the fine dining world — for a month at the three-Michelin-starred Core by Clare Smyth in London. Locally, Smith has interned at Jean-Georges at the Four Seasons Philadelphia in November 2022, and has done time at Michelin-aspirant Provenance and Royal Izakaya.

Currently a senior in Drexel’s culinary program, Smith said he started Ocho Supper Club as a way to express himself and cook the food he wasn’t making at his internships or in class. He initially hosted diners in his dorm room for just $35, but as word spread and attendees expanded from fellow students to curious Philly residents, influencers, and journalists, it outgrew the space. “It became too much for the dorms,” he said. “Realistically, people only have visitors that are other students. When media and influencers started coming in, it was important to protect the privacy of other students and my roommate.”

Smith’s team consists of fellow students and young, aspiring cooks who are employed at Vernick, Fork, and Morimoto. At my dinner, which cost $85 with a $20 service charge, they served a striped bass layered with carrot slice “scales” alongside a confit carrot that had fennel pollen neatly pressed into it. A citrus reduction was carefully drizzled over each component tableside. (There was a lot of tableside saucing.) A New York strip with salsa macha followed, and then a palate cleanser of caramelized miso ice cream with watermelon hibiscus and scotch bonnet granita. Dessert was a technically perfect kabocha flan with tiny edible blossoms and another tableside pour of rum. It’s one of the best meals I’d had in months.

The Ocho team is cooking with ingredients on par with those of Philly’s best restaurants because Smith is largely buying the same stuff. He purchases wholesale from Local Bound produce, a collective that brings together small area farms and is favored by restaurants like Pietramala, Emmett, and River Twice. Like Provenance’s Nich Bazik, he also shops for ingredients at Headhouse Farmers’ Market. And he made a point to tell me and my fellow diners that his alliums come from Horse Shoe Ranch in Pottstown.

But there are moments where I’m keenly aware that this is a student playing restaurant. Unlike other supper clubs I’ve attended in Philly, Ocho goes out of its way to project the narrative framework of a restaurant: Smith calls himself an executive chef and has a general manager and sous chefs — titles they all use to refer to one another during the meal. Fine dining details that are usually omitted at residential supper clubs — beverage pairings, my napkin folded into a neat triangle when I left the table, a take-home “breakfast treat” of a glossy chocolate truffle in a cardboard jewelry box — are present throughout the night.

Dining at a supper club can be rewarding and wonderful, and there are a wealth of such unique dining experiences to choose from in Philly. It can also be risky: The quality of food and service can vary drastically; Philly townhomes are not always equipped with air conditioning; and trapped in a dinner party-style atmosphere, one cannot politely escape a conversation. And in striving for a restaurant experience on both sides of the “pass,” underground operators generally do not subject themselves to the enormous difficulties of operating a licensed kitchen, managing a staff on payroll, or addressing the mountain of paperwork or liabilities that come along with a restaurant.

But Smith follows in the footsteps of similarly precocious chefs. Amanda Shulman started Her Place Supper Club out of her dorm room at UPenn. Most have forgotten by now that Flynn McGarry of Gem in New York, had started his supper club, Eureka, out of his family’s home at the age of 16. In the robust landscape of pop ups and underground supper clubs in Philly, Ocho Supper Club stands out by operating at an extremely high level.

Eventually, Smith, who graduates next year, hopes to open his own restaurant. The best restaurants often interlace a chef’s biography with dishes that transport diners into those memories. In terms of his food and storytelling, Smith has a running head start.