Seattle, WA | Fine Dining Restaurant | Seasonal Supper Club Subscription

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Key results

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• Loyal from day one: some of Lark's earliest supper club members are still subscribed years later, spending $2,000-$3,000 a year
• Revenue through the slow season: steady income during Seattle's quietest stretch, the March-April lull after Valentine's Day
• Table22 handles the logistics: guest tracking, delivery, pickup, and allergy checks, freeing up days of valuable prep time each month

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Twenty years of cooking against the grain

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Chef John Sundstrom has been cooking for nearly forty years, and running Lark, his Capitol Hill restaurant, for more than twenty of them. He won the James Beard Award for Best Chef Northwest in 2007, and the accolades have kept coming since. But ask him the secret to two decades in one of the country's toughest industries, and he doesn't talk about awards. He talks about nettles.

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"We work with a lot of foragers," Sundstrom says, describing the seasonal ingredient currently moving through Lark's kitchen. "[Wild nettles are] super nutritious and full of flavor, think of it like spinach plus." That's the Lark approach in miniature: honest food, built on deep relationships with Pacific Northwest farms and foragers, occasionally nudged toward the unfamiliar, but never so far a guest feels lost.

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"The biggest thing is just hospitality," he says. "We really want anyone who comes to Lark to have a great time, whatever their occasion is."

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That philosophy has also shaped how Sundstrom has chosen to grow, or rather, how he's chosen not to. While plenty of chefs turn early success into a restaurant group, Sundstrom and his partners went the other direction. Lark stays Lark, with only one other concept under the same roof: Slab, a casual sandwich counter next door. "We've kind of decided, let's just focus on making Lark a beautiful and special restaurant," he says. "That feels like good enough for us."

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A club that arrived at the right moment

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Staying intentionally small doesn't mean staying still. Coming out of the pandemic, Lark had already been running its own meal kit club for a year or two, a way of getting food to guests who couldn't or wouldn't come in. It worked, but it also meant Sundstrom's team was handling billing, scheduling, and customer service on top of everything else a kitchen already carries.

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Table22 gave Lark a way to keep doing what the club already did well - reach guests who'd fallen out of the habit of dining out - without carrying the operational weight alone. "Table22 came along at the right moment," Sundstrom says. "We had done our own club, and that seemed very appropriate. Then Table22 just makes it a little bit easier."

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Some of Lark's members are simply longtime regulars who go out less than they used to but still want the food. Others are new to Lark altogether, professionals who subscribe to a rotation of chef-driven clubs around the city because, as Sundstrom puts it, they want to eat well and can afford to. Both groups found their way into the same supper club.

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The same kitchen, extended

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The Lark Seasonal Supper Club pulls directly from what the restaurant is already cooking that week, rather than running off a separate takeout menu. "People are really getting what we think is the best of the moment," Sundstrom explains.

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Building a menu that holds up outside a professional kitchen took some early trial and error. Sundstrom is candid about it: "We probably made some mistakes in the first few months, but I think we've got it down pretty well." Now, dishes are engineered to finish simply, four or five minutes in the oven, a dressing to shake and drizzle, so the quality of Lark's food transfers successfully to the table at home.

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On Lark's side, Table22 handles the parts that used to eat up days of prep time. "You guys keep track of the guests, which is great," Sundstrom says.

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What I can do is just look maybe three or four days ahead, confirm our counts, who's getting delivery, who's getting pickup, and check on allergies. It's very convenient and a little more seamless, and takes less of my time, which is also valuable.

— John Sundstrom, Chef/Owner, Lark

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Regulars who never really left

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Sundstrom is often at the restaurant himself when members pick up their orders, and he's watched a group of subscribers stick with Lark almost since the club began. Looking at their annual spending, some members put $2,000 to $3,000 a year into the club - more, Sundstrom says, than they'd likely have spent coming into the dining room that often. "Almost inevitably, they just say, hey, we appreciate this so much. It was so delicious last time. Keep going."

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The timing matters as much as the loyalty. Seattle has its own seasonal rhythm, and the stretch after Valentine's Day through April is typically the restaurant's quietest. The club doesn't erase that dip, but it softens it. "It is revenue that we value," Sundstrom says. "It keeps my people employed, gives everyone something to do."

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Crafting it to your kitchen

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Asked what he'd tell another operator considering a club, Sundstrom emphasizes fitting it to your specific kitchen. "Give it a shot, and then craft it to what works for your operation," he says. A small restaurant with little room to box and store meals for a day or two might not be able to run at Lark's scale, and that's fine. Lark can comfortably handle around 100 orders a month; another shop might cap out at 30 or 40. "I think it's okay to say this is what we can do," he says, "but you'll be glad of the business."

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Two decades in, Sundstrom hasn't changed the fundamentals. He's still cooking with what the foragers bring in, and still keeping Lark a single, beautiful restaurant rather than a growing group. The supper club simply gives that same food, and that same hospitality, a new way to reach the people who love it.

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Our platform, your seasonal menu. Welcome to the club.