What Is This Actually Worth?

At the very beginning, money was the simplest part of the whole thing.

We asked for a minimum donation of £10. People booked in, turned up on the night, and put their money straight into a tub. That was it. No system, no admin, nothing that felt like a transaction — just people contributing something towards an evening they'd been part of. It was informal, and honestly, that's exactly how we liked it.

From a Tub to a Business Account

At some point we decided to open a proper business account with Monzo. It felt like a small step at the time, but it changed things more than we expected. We could send a payment link to anyone who wanted to book on, and it just worked — no cash to count at the end of the night, no tub to empty and it meant the money was actually there, ready, when we needed to buy the produce for the next evening. It kept the same easy, informal spirit we started with. It just made the practical side of it simpler.

The Questions We Hadn't Thought to Ask

Then came the question neither of us had thought about until it landed in front of us: what happens if someone cancels? Do we refund them, or do we keep the money?

It sounds like such an obvious thing to sort out in hindsight, but we'd built this whole thing on trust and goodwill, and suddenly we needed something that looked a bit more like terms and conditions. We asked around — other people running similar things, other practitioners doing their own version of this — to see how they handled it when someone couldn't come anymore. What we landed on felt fair to us: if we can fill the space with someone else, we refund, or move the booking to another date. If we can't fill it, the money stays with us, because by that point we've already bought the ingredients and started prepping the food. It isn't about being strict. It's about the fact that a soup doesn't un-cook itself once someone drops out.

Working Out What to Charge

We also had to properly sit down and think about what a fair price actually looked like. We looked at what other venues were charging for a comparable evening — what a bowl of soup and a bread roll might cost elsewhere — just to get a sense of where we sat.

But we couldn't simply charge what a restaurant would, because we weren't a restaurant. We were hosting in someone's home, not to restaurant standard, and that mattered to us. It felt important that the price reflected what this actually was — two women cooking in their own kitchens, not a polished commercial operation — even as the food itself kept getting better and more ambitious.

When £10 Stopped Being Enough

That £10 minimum donation worked perfectly well while we were hosting at Kaytee's house. There was no venue to pay for, so almost all of it simply went on food.

The moment we moved to The Adelphi Tearoom, that stopped adding up. Suddenly there was an hourly hire cost to factor in, on top of business insurance we'd already had to sort out properly rather than think about later. The whole cost picture changed, and £10 alone couldn't carry a venue hire fee the way it had once easily carried a big pot of soup.

The booking process changed alongside it. In the early days it was about as simple as it could be: someone would message to say they wanted a spot, we'd send over a Monzo link, and once it was paid, they were added to the WhatsApp group and that was that. Since the move to the Adelphi, we've moved onto a proper CRM, with our own booking page, a payment checkout built in, and an automated welcome email that goes out the moment someone books. It's slicker, and it's saved us a lot of manual admin. But it's also another overhead added to the list — one more thing the price now has to cover, alongside everything else.

Choosing a Number Out of Three

Eventually we landed on tiered pricing — £20, £25 or £30 — so women could choose the amount they felt able to invest, rather than everyone being locked into a single figure. It felt fairer, somehow. More in keeping with how we'd always done things.

Except then we second-guessed that too. Was tiered pricing actually the right approach, or would people prefer one simple, set price? Someone told me outright that she found it genuinely difficult to choose which tier to pick — that the choice itself felt like a small hurdle rather than a kindness. I honestly don't know, looking back, how we worked any of it out. Around that time I went to some free training on running a small business, on how to sell what you do, and every single one of them said some version of the same thing: you own the price. Take responsibility for it. It's worth what you decide it's worth.

I still think about that.

Feeling Like a Business for the First Time

Since moving to the Adelphi, this has started to feel like an actual business in a way it never quite did before — and we haven't been able to pay ourselves yet. That's alright. We love what we're doing, and there's a lot that goes into it before any of that becomes a conversation worth having.

The planning alone is constant. What menu are we serving. Are we doing a craft this time, or bringing in a guest speaker instead. Are we actually going to fill the seats this week. My brain doesn't really switch off from it — always turning over how to get more people sat around that table.

We're lucky that Terri, who owns the Adelphi, is wonderful about all of it. We had to cancel our very first supper club there, because no one had booked on. Nobody. And Terri didn't make us pay for the room hire that night regardless. That kindness meant more than she probably realised.

It has been, and still is, a steep learning curve.

Somewhere in among all these questions about tubs and refunds and pricing, something else was quietly happening. Cooking for a small group of people, sitting with them for a few hours, started pulling in conversations that had nothing to do with the food or the crafts on the table at all. People began talking about the things that were actually going on for them — the stuff underneath the small talk.

Looking back, I think that's the moment this stopped being simply an evening with nice food, and started being something people needed for reasons far beyond the meal itself. Working out what to charge for that was never going to be as simple as pricing a bowl of soup.

This is the fourth in a series about building a supper club from scratch.