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Boku: Inside one of the city's hottest underground supper clubs

Guests are encouraged to dress their best and bring their favorite bottle to a location that is disclosed only a few days beforehand. Never to be repeated, the tasting menus are driven by the seasonality of local produce and meats.

You walk into the brownstone to the aroma of honey and fennel.

You hear the clamor from the kitchen as plates bang on the wooden counters.

The lighting is calming. The voices are low. You find your seat.

This is the underground supper club called Boku.

Boku is a phonetic spelling of the French word beaucoup, which can mean fun, loose, perhaps somewhat extravagant - all fitting, because the monthly Boku dinners, which always sell out, are all of those things.

Guests are encouraged to dress their best and bring their favorite bottle to a location that is disclosed only a few days beforehand. Never to be repeated, the tasting menus are driven by the seasonality of local produce and meats. Each guest can expect to pay about $10 per course.

Behind it is Ryan Fitzgerald, a graduate of Villanova University who also works for a venture-capital firm and owns two e-commerce companies. He manages every aspect of Boku, including ticketing, menu planning, ingredient shopping, building the website, and managing the social media. He wants to support the local food economy by letting independent purveyors drive his menu decisions.

"This is my way to make an impact by connecting local, honest, farmers and purveyors with the neighborhood," Fitzgerald says. "As custodians of their product, we take great care and pride in telling the story of the food that is on the plate."

He also has no restaurant experience whatsoever.

Growing up the son of professionals in Bethesda, Md., Fitzgerald had a Brazilian nanny who cooked for him. "I remember sitting on the floor of the pews in church and taking the hymn books, pretending they were recipe books, and serving my parents imaginary soup when I was 5 or 6 years old." His parents also were eager hosts.

While in college, Fitzgerald went on YouTube to soak up episodes of Munchies (a Vice series focused on cuisine) and a Harvard lecture series about the science of food. Cooking then went from a hobby to an obsession. He bought cookbooks and expensive equipment, and started immersing himself in the culinary arts.

While living in Manayunk, Fitzgerald learned about chef/restaurateur Eddie Huang and his NYC bao bun shop Baohaus. He spent the next several months working on his own recipe, with the idea to open a pork bun and ramen spot in Manayunk. After researching the process, he realized that he had been delusional. He focused on scaling things back, and finally asked himself, "Why don't I just start doing this out of an apartment?"

The first Boku in 2014, called Baos and Bones, incorporated Fitzgerald's bao bun recipe with Korean fried chicken. After rounding up 20 friends, he decided to host an event once a month.

The first dinners were mainly solo projects, but with time, Fitzgerald saw Boku as a platform for chefs to showcase their ideas. Nowadays, Boku is a collaboration from beginning to end between Fitzgerald and a guest chef.

Month after month, friends have told friends, who told Uwishunu, which featured Boku as one of the best underground dining clubs in 2015.

Now, with about 1,000 people on the reservation waiting list, Fitzgerald said he rarely sees a familiar face - "and that's validation that something is resonating."

At a recent Boku, among the crowd was a woman from Buffalo named Nancy, who was visiting her son. "Coming to something like this is like going out to dinner with a friend and sitting at the bar instead of a table," she said. "It's a signal that you want to be social and meet people."

As the group chatted under the chandeliers and gold mirrors of a first-floor Victorian brownstone, the chef collaborator for the evening, Gary Burner, worked feverishly in the kitchen alongside Fitzgerald.

Before each of the seven courses hit the table, Fitzgerald provided the background for the dishes, citing purveyors used and the preparation. He explained that he would not serve two dishes that he had planned because they were not up to his standards.

While planning the menu, Fitzgerald and his collaborator will change the entire scope and direction if something as seemingly inconsequential as fresh, local rhubarb isn't available. The prep process is long and intense, considering that only two bodies are working in the kitchen to put out food for 25 to 30 people.

A recent Mediterranean-themed dinner showed mixed results. Some courses outperformed their subtle menu descriptions. A chilled corn soup with puffed farrow, grand cru olive oil, and Fresno pepper was the perfect appetizer to calm both body temperature and palate. The handmade paprika pappardelle with grilled octopus and lemon butter sauce was delicious and complicated on many levels, specifically texture. Others fell short for me. A lamb dish with squash, yogurt sauce, and gooseberry was overcooked. A reimagined Caprese dessert seemed well-intentioned but just didn't blend.

Overall, I found the experience, menu, and personality well worth the price tag, though at times a lack of traditional chef training can be noticed.

Even Fitzgerald acknowledges this. "You need to go in with an open mind and know this isn't a four-star restaurant," he said later. "Things do go wrong and dishes can flop. You go for the experience, not just the food."

As he says on his website: "The food is free. The experience is not."