Think of it less as a supper club, more as a leisurely “series of dinner parties” set by a husband-and-wife team of chef and college professor.
The former is Ian Moroney, previously co-owner and chef of Pumpkin, the South Street BYOB which ended an almost 20-year run this August. The latter is Sharon Thompson-Schill, a neuroscience professor at Penn and a staple on the city’s dining scene/dubbed the city’s “most enthusiastic diner” by the Inquirer.
The result of their recent union is Calliope, a showcase of seasonal flavors and local ingredients hosted by the couple at their Rittenhouse Square apartment building.
Parties are held about four times a month, in pairs of consecutive days mixed between weekends and midweek to match diners’ schedules. “It’s not meant to be a full-time thing,” Thompson-Schill told Billy Penn. “We’re just passionate about cooking and making food with each other and sharing it with other people, so that’s what we’re trying to do.”
Throughout the evenings, guests are invited into the kitchen space to watch dishes being prepared by the couple; at the end of the night, Moroney and Thompson-Schill share information on the ingredients and produce used, and where everything was sourced from (a list of their regular suppliers is available on their website).
“One thing we’re trying to accomplish,” Moroney said, “is trumpeting the things that we love about the local economy, whether it’s the local farms or local businesses.”
Each party offers seating for eight and a seven-course meal: three standing and three seated, bookended with a welcoming cocktail and dessert course with coffee. The dinners are BYOB—Thompson-Schill provides suggested wine pairings beforehand—and priced at $140 per person.
The menu changes according to seasonal availability and diner preferences collected in advance by Thompson-Schill. A previous pescatarian-leaning lineup featured a starting trio of whitefish salad with black lentil cracker; pumpkin bread with Chinese five-spice apple butter and chanterelle; and Caesar salad-style popcorn with anchovies.
For the same evening’s seated courses: scallop crudo with eggplant conserva and tomato dashi; bluefin tuna with gigante beans, broccoli, and tonnato; and a salad of sweet potato puree, pumpkin, chicory, and lobster mushroom—the couple’s take on a similar dish at Heavy Metal Sausage, one of their favorite spots and ““a place that inspires us every single week,” Thompson-Schill said.
Inspiration, the couple explained, is the theme of the project, which takes its name from the Greek muse and goddess of song, as well as from the musical instrument popular in early American street fairs (the Capuchin monkey logo is a reference to those used by performers to collect money, and to the pet Thompson-Schill had as a child.) Signing up for a dinner, guests are asked to name a source of inspiration, to be displayed on a place card and serve as a conversation starter.
The idea for Calliope came shortly after the couple’s wedding at Ten Stone, the South Street bar where they’d met exactly 6 months earlier. Waiting for a friend that evening, Thompson-Schill, who had often frequented Pumpkin while never meeting its chef, found herself in restaurant-related conversation with another bar-goer who eventually mentioned Moroney, a friend he hadn’t seen in some time. A few minutes later, Moroney, in a spur-of-the-moment break from his routine of going home after work, stopped in for a beer.
Besides a shared affinity for farmers’ markets and local dining, “we loved cooking together and we loved working together,” Thompson-Schill said the pair quickly discovered—for a while she even lent Moroney a hand at Pumpkin. When the restaurant closed and after Moroney had taken a month to regroup, Thompson-Schill suggested, “Hey, I go to a lot of these supper clubs. We could do one.”
With Calliope, Moroney handles most of the cooking, Thompson-Schill the baking as well as managing their social media and digital platforms. The two set and whittle down the menus together before hitting the farmers’ markets and Moroney’s regular purveyors (prior to Pumpkin, he had spent time working at his father’s Little Fish restaurant, at its original 600 Catharine Street location.)
For Moroney, the chance to cook without the constraints of a restaurant with overhead and staff has been liberating. “It’s the thing I’ve always wanted, and the thing we lost at [Pumpkin] even—a connection with people,” he said. “It stopped being fun.”
Now? “I can connect with customers in a way I’ve never been able to,” he said. “This isn’t like a testing ground for a restaurant. This is something we’re doing solely out of love.”
For more information, visit calliopephilly.com
