Why I set up a 'bromantic' supper club with my best friends

Thursday evening at the Tiroler Hut, an Austrian restaurant in a Westbourne Grove basement that’s decorated like an Alpine lodge. A handful of thirty-something men sit clinging to huge, half-empty steins of lager, surrounded by the desecrated remains of several sausage platters and a cheese fondue.

We’ve just convinced our waiter — a pink-cheeked Hungarian in lederhosen — that today is one of our birthdays. So he’s brought us a slice of strudel with a candle in it, to be consumed during the restaurant’s nightly music show: a man playing ‘Edelweiss’ on a set of Tirolean cowbells. The first act of a stag party? In fact it’s the climactic scene from the inaugural meeting of what has come to be known, between us, as the A-to-Z Dining Club.

In January, a couple of friends — Chris, an actor and screenwriter, and Dan, a magazine editor — and I decided we didn’t see enough of each other. Our mid-30s had arrived, bringing with them small children, big mortgages and increasingly busy careers. One of us had deleted most of his social media in an anti-Zuckerberg huff, so the others couldn’t even pretend to know what was going on in his private life by perusing his irregular status updates. Plans to meet would be mooted, postponed and quietly forgotten amid family commitments and pressing Master of None Netflix binges.

Leaving the sofa on a weekday evening when you’re a youngish father is a lot less inviting a prospect than it used to be. Leaving the house to go for an impromptu pint-with-the-lads is borderline socially unacceptable. If we were to remain in each other’s lives as more than members of an old chums’ WhatsApp group, something drastic needed to be done. We could have started a book club, but since we’re all writers of some description in our professional lives, nobody wants to talk about work on a night out. We could have started a five-a-side football game — but, again, we’re all writers. Enough said.

We needed a project: something that sounded sufficiently important to convince us (and our wives) that it should be pursued without flakiness or excuses. And so once a month, we take advantage of London’s unsurpassed cultural diversity and stuff our faces with a different national cuisine. To give the exercise some structure, we decided to do it alphabetically: in February, we ate at the Austrian place. In March, we went Burmese. Cuban in April, Danish in May, Ethiopian in June, French in July… and so on, towards the inevitable Zimbabwean finale. The idea is not to sample the best or the trendiest food in town, nor is it to learn more about the nooks and crannies of the capital that we’ve yet to explore, although that’s certainly part of the fun. What the

A-to-Z Dining Club offers is the rare chance to press pause on our hectic lives for a few hours and enjoy each other’s company. Plus: dinner.

For several years in the Noughties, the three of us shared a grotty flat above a Thai restaurant in the heart of Spitalfields, where an evening out at the pub required no more than 30 seconds’ planning. Once a week — sometimes twice — we dined on takeaway curry from Sweet & Spicy, a cheap and authentic Pakistani canteen on Brick Lane. At the time we took these meals for granted — now, they are a treasured memory. A decade later, if I want to eat a takeaway, I order it on an iPhone app after my two-year-old daughter has gone to bed. Most of our gang used to be jammed into flat-shares in the same proximate cluster of east London postcodes. These days, everyone lives in different neigh-bourhoods, which may as well be in different continents.

You may be aware of just how dread-inducing the prospect of ‘dinner with friends’ can be at this age. Those so-called friends could be the other parents you kept bumping into at the playground until it seemed impolite not to suggest a spag bol. They could be an old pal of your partner, forcing you to make hours of small talk with their new boyfriend, who’s rude to waiters and voted Leave.

Dinner with old friends, on the other hand, could mean arriving at the restaurant 20 minutes late, frazzled by first-world problems and barely capable of coherent speech, sliding gently into a conversation strewn with in-jokes about new TV shows and long-ago nights out, the inevitable discussions of Trump or Brexit conducted inside a comfort zone where they won’t put you off your food.

The A-to-Z experience is a learning curve. We’ve discovered that Burmese food (yes, I know: if we were being scrupulously politically correct, we should probably have waited for ‘M’ to eat that) is scandalously under-appreciated. At Lahpet, in a railway arch near London Fields, we feasted on fermented tea leaf salad — ‘lahpet’ means ‘pickled tea’ — and a platter of moreish sweetcorn, shrimp and tofu fritters. We’ve realised that Cuban cocktails are not to be trifled with. A couple of dark and stormys into our evening at Escudo de Cuba in Dalston, we hit the tequila slammers. The last time I had a tequila slammer, Tony Blair was in No 10 — I had to be reminded in what order to slam the salt, shot and lime. By home time, I was ready to join the salsa class that was under way in the downstairs bar. Almost.

Oh, and we’ve discovered that our fantastically original idea is not that original after all. On a warm evening in May, we made our way to Snaps + Rye in North Kensington. It purports to be the only Danish restaurant at the time of writing, which means any Londoner on an A-to-Z eating lark must pass through its doors. ‘Yes, we get a lot of Ds,’ the maître d’ said.

As for our wives — they appear to view our culinary quests with a mix of amusement and curiosity. After several conversations beginning, ‘So what actually happens when…’, we broke with convention and invited them to come along. Instead of a table for three at Lalibela, an Ethiopian eatery in Tufnell Park, we booked for six. My wife seemed mildly disappointed by just how un-raucous it all was. She was expecting The Hangover — she got The Trip.

We won’t reach the end of the alphabet until early 2019, but the A-Z Dining Club has already highlighted this city’s staggering depth and breadth. There are few other places in which it would be remotely sustainable. Yet in London, we’d visited four continents before even crossing the river. Admittedly, we’re likely to run into difficulties when we arrive at ‘O’ in April 2018, since apparently there are no Omani restaurants in London (recommendations on a postcard please). Perhaps we’ll bend the rules and go Oaxacan.

For ‘P’, it would be poetic to return to Sweet & Spicy, but sadly our Brick Lane favourite closed in 2013, to be replaced by a buffalo wings joint. Some restaurants on our list are staples like the Tiroler Hut; others will be gone before we reach ‘Z’, like Lahpet, which only has a one-year lease. London changes, yet it stays the same — and so it goes with our friendship. We’ll all soon go grey or bald, develop back trouble or knee trouble or put on too much weight — but at least, this way, we’ll be putting on weight together.