Creative Spotlight: The Secret Spice Supper Club Tells Stories of Resilience Through Food

Food has long brought people together at various tables, and in India, where communal meals are the norm not the exception, it becomes the centerpiece of every gathering. As the need for third spaces rises across major cities in the country, supper clubs have seen a continuous surge over the past few years. With food and socialization sitting at the heart of these meet-ups, more often than not, each supper club is shrouded in a different theme and has a story to tell.  

One such story is of the Secret Spice Supper Club, hosted by Vatsala Khandelwal at her family home in Kolkata, India. What started off as a chance to cook and host her friends and acquaintances, slowly grew into something more intentional and rooted in its explorations. Through shared conversations between strangers, over a six-course meal inspired by the Eurasian spice routes, Vatsala has created a supper club that feels purposeful. Over video call and at one of her suppers, she tells EnVi about her journey into this space and takes us along into one of her intimate evenings.

How Secret Spice Supper Club Began

Every creative endeavor starts with inspiration. For Secret Spice, the inspiration lies in Vatsala’s work as a humanitarian lawyer, and her obsession with the Silk Road and the Eurasian spice route. During her stint with the UNHCR and CHRI, she worked with Indian refugees in Bengal. She was based in Geneva during the 55th Human Rights Council Session in 2024, when she found herself frustrated and disillusioned by the grim geopolitical situation. After years of living away, she returned to her family home and began exploring food as creative expression.

“I was always a good eater,” she says when asked what inspires her love for food. A self-taught chef, the recipes and dishes she features in the supper club involve a lot of trial and error. “I approach it less with the mindset of a chef, with less focus on the food itself and more focus on the storylines, so it’s more of a creative medium for me.”

Creatively Curious

Curiosity and research guide Vatsala’s explorations at Secret Spice. The Eurasian spice route is a permanent fixture on her inspiration board, along with the theme of migration, which defines her culinary endeavors as well as her historic and fictional reading. “Migration is just fundamental to human history. […]That’s how every culture has been formed. That’s how every fire in our history has risen, or been brought down.” The conversation naturally moves towards how migration magnifies humans’ survival instinct, and how food chronicles the story of human resilience. One such dish she has previously reinterpreted for one of her menus was made by Saharan nomads. During extended periods of time without any crops, they would catch locusts and knead them together with dates, rose water, and other spices to sustain themselves.

It is this obsession with food, geography, and world history that drives Vatsala to explore the unknown. Once there’s a particular aspect she’s fixed upon she begins her research; from there on, it’s like the pieces of a puzzle falling into place. The most challenging and fascinating part involves finding palatable substitutes for dishes that came about as a means of survival, like the Saharan locust dish. After several rounds of recipe testing, it’s time to hit the bazaar (local market) and see what produce is available.

When it comes to fresh produce, India vastly differs from the West. Due to the tropical climate and the lack of cold chain storage, the taste, smell, and color of the produce changes by the week. “That’s why I’m very particular about going and hand-picking the produce by myself,” she explains. This allows her the discretion to decide if she would like to serve something or change the course itself. Once all of that’s done, it’s time to open up the supper to the audience. 

Food in the Face of Displacement

When communities face large-scale displacement due to genocide, wars, and conflicts, what happens to the food they’ve known and eaten all their lives? This was the question Vatsala contended with before coming up with her current Roots Menu. The inspiration lay in the invisible work of women in passing down recipes which go beyond the written word, often narrated with no exact measurements. To lay the groundwork for this menu, she started with three cookbooks: Sami Tamimi’s Boustany as well as Hawa Hassan’s In Bibi’s Kitchen and Setting a Place For Us. 

Vatsala began learning about the food cultures of the six countries the menu focuses upon — Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and Yemen — all of which she has never visited or tried the authentic food of. Her idea of what Levantine cuisine tastes like was very broad, but the urge to dig deeper took over. “I was sure that what people eat at home is very different from what is served at restaurants.” After studying the flavors, she zeroed in on making the storytelling emotionally resonant; rather than painting it as a morbid and pitiful situation, she wanted to bring awareness and attention to the everlasting effect displacement has on the food cultures of these countries.

The six-course menu beautifully wove in elements from each country. Spices native to the Levant region — za’atar, sumac, and anise — made frequent appearances. The courses were interspersed with easy conversations, most of them hinging around food. With each successive course being brought out, you could feel the relief and the joy of fulfillment radiate off of Vatsala. As she introduced the dishes on the menu, she also explained how they were reinterpreted using local produce and as plant-forward to accommodate vegan guests — all while retaining the same flavor and texture that she had studied in those cookbooks. A personal standout on the menu was the vegetable shawarma, served with a smoked sahawig, a Yemeni condiment similar to salsa. Another homestyle Yemeni dish on the menu was the areeka, which combines the rich flavors of dates and cardamom with the soft, floral scent of dried roses and a nutty chocolate bark. The menu infallibly demonstrates how food culture sustains displacement, despite the use of ingredients not local to the Levant region.

Setting the Scene

Suppers at Secret Spice follow the cardinal rule of experiential design: “Whenever you’re designing an experience, you lead with all five senses.” Every detail at the table corresponds with the menu; visual cues act as icebreakers between courses, curated playlists go perfectly with the story, and various textures on the table give you a sense of the landscape the food comes from. The olive trees of Palestine are a recurring imagery at the supper, incorporated in the menu design and the tablescape, as an enduring symbol of peaceful resistance. Each guest went back home with personally addressed postcards, featuring art and poetry from the Levant region. As you step into Vatsala’s family home for supper, you feel warmth enveloping you. While everything about the evening feels novel, there is also a sort of familiarity and intimacy that you only find in a home-cooked meal.

A Marker of Identity

In one of our conversations, Vatsala proudly denounces authenticity when it comes to food. “Authenticity is only something that exists in a period of time, because every two or three generations the authentic will change,” she says. This became a defining factor in how she approaches her recipes, always taking a step back to focus on the flavor and the story rather than fixating too much on perfection. Coming up on over a year of doing this, she feels creatively juiced up and confident to host something bigger and more experiential, with a more detailed approach. 

When discussing what she hopes people take back from the suppers, we come back to curiosity. These are food cultures that are inaccessible to most people, she shares. “But every time you enter a new world, it just leaves you with, at least if nothing else, curiosity about that culture […]  And if people go back having met people they made friends with, then that’s a bonus.”

Vatsala shares, “I think food is one of the first things that a person understands about their culture, every other messaging and every other conditioning comes after, and it is also what stays.” Food remains one of the primary signifiers of one’s identity, deeply tied to the human psyche without any conscious effort to keep it that way. In the midst of it all, the Secret Spice supper club stands as a unique culinary anthropology project chronicling the story of survival, resilience, and belonging through food. 

Looking to learn more about food culture? Check out our coverage on Phở With Phriends!