Berkeley Supper Club — 2026 So Far

Before the numbers, two things to do this week:

1. RSVP for Soom × Berkeley Supper Club, 5/31

We’re closing out the spring at Urban Adamah on Sunday, May 31 with our second ingredient collaboration of the season, a tahini-centered menu in partnership with Soom Foods.

Why do we do ingredient collaborations? A few honest reasons. High-quality ingredients show up at the table that we wouldn’t be able to sustainably source on our own. Margins feel less stressful on the night and having a single ingredient as the spine of the menu (tahini for this one, sichuan peppercorns last time) makes the dishes genuinely fun for the volunteers to design together. Partnerships with these companies can also bring long-term product discounts that not only lower the cost of running events for BSC as a member-supported social club, but make their way to our member base at large through discount codes and more.

A note on who we partner with. Of course, we’d prefer to go fully local, and we already do where we can. Feral Ecology, Flying Noir, A Fork Full of Earth, the Cultured Pickle Shop all show up at our table on a regular basis. But the reality of ingredient and product manufacturing means some of what we want doesn’t exist from a Bay Area producer. So we are expanding the circle outward, selectively, to build a pantry of items from ingredient partners that genuinely want to help make this project sustainable.

A huge thanks to 50Hertz Tingly Foods. They were the first company willing to take on a major menu collaboration with us before we had a track record of doing them. Electric Spring proved the format works. Soom is the next chapter.

Why Soom specifically. Soom was founded by three sisters: Amy, Shelby, and Jackie Zitelman. I grew up in a trio of brothers, so the sibling-built business hit a personal note before the food did. They’re Israeli-American, women-owned, and quality-obsessed. Tahini is foundational to Jewish and Levantine cooking, so planning a dinner on their tahini felt like honoring something that was already central at our table. Their chocolate tahini spread is also a great nut-free alternative for kids, which is huge in American school systems that often have sweeping bans on products that contain peanuts and tree nuts.

As usual, member dues will be on a sliding-scale: $60 / $90 / $120+

Reserve your seat → luma.com/axfv42cv

2. Become an Active Member on Luma

We’ve formalized Berkeley Supper Club’s membership structure. Going forward, Active Member status on Luma is required for event participation. Membership is free.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter but haven’t joined as an active member on the Luma calendar homepage yet, this is the moment to do it.

How to join:

1. Open the BSC Luma calendar → luma.com/berkeleysupperclub
2. Click Join (or Become a Member on mobile)
3. Fill in the short membership acknowledgment form
4. Hit Join to submit

Note: If you do not see the option to “Become a Member” on Mobile, try updating the application to the latest version!

The newsletter will stay separate (it’s where this kind of writing lives), but Luma is now the home for membership and events. If you’ve been to a BSC event in the past, your seat at the next one depends on the completion of this step. If you run into any issues, please reach out directly to Luma support (support@luma.com) and CC us (hello@berkeleysupperclub.org) so we can push resolutions!

Spring 2026 So Far

We took January off after Hanukkah and used the time to lay groundwork for the year. Then we hosted three back-to-back dinners that broke prior attendance records and kicked off our first ingredient collaboration. Here’s the season in plain numbers, including the parts that don’t make a dinner look so glamorous.

By the Numbers (January – April 2026)

• 3 dinners hosted: February Supper Club (2/15), March Supper Club (3/15), and Electric Spring with 50Hertz Tingly Foods (4/19), all at Urban Adamah
• 175 unique attendees across the spring
• 166 tickets sold, with $480 in refunds processed
• 71 average attendance per event. Every event cleared 60 members
• 77 returning members across the three events
• 32 people attended at least two events this spring
• 36% average returning share, up from roughly 20% across 2025
• ~15 volunteers per event powering back-of-house and front-of-house, unpaid
• Substack subscribers: 700+, up >35% from 516 at the start of the year
• Paid Substack subscribers: 25 lifetime (19 active during this period), generating roughly $890 in subscription revenue over four months, our only recurring income outside ticket sales

Operational Milestones

• Urban Adamah anchor partnership settled into a recurring monthly rhythm
• Electric Spring, our first formal ingredient collaboration, with 50Hertz Tingly Foods
• Substack → Ghost migration: moving our newsletter off Substack in June to give us full ownership of the subscriber relationship and the publishing layer
• Internal data infrastructure rebuilt. Every event is now reconcilable across ticket revenue, expenses, and attendance, and gets published transparently
• Kitchen team of recurring volunteer leads, plus 12–18 day-of volunteers who make each event possible.
• Formal membership tier launched in Luma

Financial Activity (January – April 2026)

Income

• Ticket revenue: $13,450 gross / $12,529 net after Stripe fees and refunds
• Substack paid subscription revenue: $1,040 gross / $892 net
• Total net income: $13,421

Event expenses: $9,750

• Venue: $4,100
• Food & beverage: $4,004
• Staffing: $850
• Insurance: $531
• Other event costs: $265

Operating overhead: $967

• Software & admin (QuickBooks, Luma, Ghost, email, domains): $367
• Equipment, one-time (ceramic serving ware): $600

Net surplus across four months: roughly $2,700

That works out to roughly $675 in operating cash flow per month across our most active stretch ever, built on three core leads doing roughly three days of unpaid work per event, plus a rotating volunteer team doing 6-8 hour shifts day-of, also unpaid. Worth noting: our operating overhead has outpaced our newsletter subscription revenue.

A note on what isn’t in these numbers. The figures above reflect cash flowing through the BSC checking account. They don’t capture the time of the unpaid team that produces every dinner, or pending vendor invoices not yet processed. The real cost of running BSC is meaningfully higher than what the bank statement shows.

This is the part of the picture most people don’t see. Our path to sustainability isn’t more dinners…it’s funding the team that already runs them. That's what lets us expand programming without burning out the volunteers (or the founder).

Closing Remarks

Three dinners over three months at near-capacity attendance, meaningfully bigger and deeper than the equivalent stretch in 2025. Average attendance has nearly doubled (71 vs ~37 last year), and our returning share has climbed from roughly 20% to 36%.

Here’s the big lesson from this stretch: we’ve reached the ceiling of what we can do on the current funding model. Every dinner runs at near-capacity. The team is unpaid. We can sustain the current event cadence, but we cannot expand into new programming (member family programming, classes, a paid team) without one of two unlocks:

1. Grants through fiscal sponsorship from a 501(c)(3) partner. We’ll begin applying this summer.
2. Member-funded programming: paid supporter tiers (launching with our Ghost migration in June), higher contributions on the sliding scale at events, or one-time support from those with capacity.

Direct contribution link: Contribute here

Berkeley Supper Club is a 501(c)(7) social club organized for the benefit of its members. Contributions support member programming and are not tax-deductible as charitable donations.

Path one is slow and external. Path two is something every reader can act on, either through a one-time contribution today or by becoming a paid supporter when we land on Ghost in June. If Berkeley Supper Club has been a meaningful table for you and you have the means, this is the moment that support converts into more programming, not just a sustained cadence. More tables, a better experience for returning members, and programming our membership has been asking for.

See you 5/31.

— Alon