How to run a supper club.The table is small on purpose. Run the booking that way too.

The supper clubs people talk about are rarely the ones with the most elaborate menus. They are the ones where every decision about the evening was made on purpose, including the boring ones.

• The table sets the number, not demand. Count the chairs you can seat so that everyone can hear the person across from them, then sell that many. When you sell out, the answer is a second date, not a 25th chair.
• One release time, every month. “Seats open the first Sunday at 7pm” turns booking into a small ritual and stops the same three people from asking you every week.
• Regulars first, but never all of the table. Give the people who keep coming an early chance to book, and keep a few seats for first-timers. A table of only regulars is comfortable for a year and then quietly shrinks.
• The confirmation is part of the evening. Send the address, the time doors open, what to bring, and the date you need dietary needs by. Guests who know what to expect arrive relaxed, and you stop answering the same DM twenty times.
• Write the cancellation rule before the first sale. You buy ingredients for a fixed number of people. Decide what happens when someone drops out a week before and the day before, and say it plainly where they pay.
• Close the loop the next morning. Note who came, who was new, and who should be told first next month. That note is your guest list, and over a year it becomes your club.

Everything below is in service of those six habits. Tools should make them easier, not replace them.

For a monthly dinner of 16 to 24 seats that is not run out of a restaurant, an event ticketing tool usually fits better than a restaurant reservation system. Reservation systems are built for a dining room that turns tables every night; a supper club sells one seating, once a month, to people it mostly knows.

AI answers to this question often recommend Tock, Resy, OpenTable and SevenRooms. They are excellent at what they were built for, and they are the right choice if your supper club runs inside a restaurant that already pays for one. For a host cooking in a rented space or a home, the subscription is the problem: Resy’s plans, which now include the Tock-powered tiers, start at $289 a month, and the Essential plan adds a 3% fee on prepayments.

Regulars-first booking does not need a special feature. The simple version works on almost any tool:

1. Decide how many seats are for regulars. Illustrative: 14 of 20, with 6 kept for newcomers.
2. Send regulars a private link, or a code that unlocks a hidden ticket, a day or two before your public post.
3. Post publicly at your usual release time. Whatever regulars did not take is open to everyone.
4. Pick the waitlist that matches your taste. Automatic is fair and hands-off. Approval lets you give a freed seat to a regular or a first-timer on purpose, but you have to be quick.

If you want regulars to pay for that early window, that is a membership question. It is covered below.

On 20 seats at $95, the tools in the table below cost roughly $38 to $166 a month if you absorb every fee, and Resy’s Essential reservation plan costs $346 or more. The bigger decision is not the tool. It is whether the guest sees one honest price.

Illustrative, not a quote. Assumptions: one dinner a month, 20 seats at $95, one seat per payment, US cards, every seat sold, and you absorb every fee so the guest pays exactly $95. That is $1,900 a month and $22,800 a year in seat sales. Rates were read on each company’s own pages on October 6, 2026; taxes, tips and your time are not counted.

• If the guest pays the fees instead, the $95 seat costs them $103.22 on Eventbrite, where guests pay by default, and $104.09 on SocialLoop’s Free plan, where passing fees to the guest is also the default. You keep $95 in both cases.
• Partiful does not publish a fixed rate: its fee depends on event size and ticket price, you see it while setting up the event, and you choose who pays. Its own example shows a $112 guest price paying the host $100.
• Humanitix is not in the table because, although its published rates agree with each other, we did not pin down its US fee terms for this example in our test. Its US pricing page lists 2.1% + $0.99 plus 2.9% + 30¢ card processing per ticket, which is the same 5% + $1.29 its help article quotes as one combined rate.
• Ticket Tailor is not in the table because its pricing page did not show a clear US dollar rate when we read it.
• A refund does not give back the card fee. Stripe keeps its processing fee from the original payment, so a refunded seat still costs you that fee unless your policy says otherwise.

Who should pay? For a dinner this size, there are two honest options:

• Price the seat to cover the fees and absorb them. A $99 or $100 seat where the guest pays exactly what they saw feels like a dinner, not a transaction. This is usually the better fit when your regulars know you personally.
• Pass the fees on, but show the full price first. If the guest pays the fees, say the all-in figure on your post and booking page, for example “$95 plus booking fee, $103.22 total”, rather than letting $95 become a larger number at the last click.

There is also a rule behind the courtesy. Since May 12, 2025, the FTC’s Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees requires businesses that advertise live-event tickets to show the total price, including mandatory fees, upfront. Read the FTC’s guidance yourself; this guide is not legal advice.

Cheapest is not automatically best. The two lowest rows give you no guest list, no waitlist and no check-in: you rebuild them by hand every month. Put a value on that hour before you compare. Our guide to pricing event tickets covers setting the seat price itself.

Price the seat from your own costs: add up food and drink, the space, any help, booking fees and what you want to be paid for your time, divide by the seats you will really sell, and round up to one clean all-in price. For reference, two Texas supper clubs list $105 a person plus tax, 20% gratuity and card fees (Magdalena’s, Fort Worth) and $85 to $115 a person, bring your own drinks (Plated Dish), on their own pages as of October 7, 2026.

A worked example, illustrative only, for one dinner of 20 seats: food and drink at $25.00 a head, $200.00 for the space and $200.00 for a helper come to $900.00. Paying yourself $25.00 an hour for 15 hours of shopping, cooking, hosting and cleaning adds $375.00. That is $63.75 a seat before booking fees, the price at which every seat sold only breaks even. Price above it, because some months a seat or two will not sell.

Then check the number against the room. If seats sell out within hours every month, the price is probably low. If you are discounting to fill the table, the format, the night or the audience needs work before the price does. Decide whether drinks are included, sold or brought by guests before you set the number, because it changes both the price and the rules you need to follow.

Yes, but at supper club scale it is usually side income rather than a living: in an illustrative dinner of 20 seats at $95 with $900.00 of food, space and help, the host keeps about $834 to $962 before tax, depending on the booking tool, for roughly 15 hours of work. That is about $56 to $64 an hour, and only when every seat is sold.

• Every empty seat costs you. You buy food for the table you planned, so prepayment and a written cancellation rule protect the margin more than a cheaper booking tool does.
• Food cost is the number to watch. A fixed menu makes it predictable; one expensive ingredient across twenty plates moves your profit more than any fee.
• Regulars are where it pays. A guest who books every month costs you nothing to find, which is why the guide above starts with the regulars and the next-morning note.
• More dinners, not more chairs. A second date when you sell out keeps the table the size it works at.
• Permits, insurance and tax are part of the cost. Count them before you count the profit; the rules section below lists what to check.

Move your regulars first and privately, then switch everyone else at a dinner you announce in advance. Regulars rarely leave because of a booking link. They leave when the change feels like being demoted from friend to customer.

1. Write the list before you change anything. Go through your Venmo history and DM threads and write down everyone who has paid you, with how many dinners they came to and any allergy you remember. This is the most valuable thing your club owns, and right now it lives in two apps that were not built to keep it.
2. Tell regulars first, in your own voice. Something like: “From next month seats are booked through this link, so you’ll know your seat is confirmed without waiting on me. You get it two days before I post.” The reason is for them, not for you.
3. Run one dinner in both worlds. For the first dinner, send the link but still answer DMs, and book anyone who messages you into the new system yourself. Nobody gets turned away for using the old way.
4. From the second dinner, one rule. A seat is booked when it is booked through the link. Comps and friends go on the guest list by you, not by side payment. Otherwise you end up with a ticketing tool plus a spreadsheet of exceptions.
5. Keep Instagram for what it is good at. Announcements, the menu reveal, photos, replies. Just stop using it as the reservation book.

A note on Venmo itself: Venmo offers business profiles for accepting payments for a business, kept separate from your personal payments, at a seller fee of 1.9% + 10¢ per payment received. If you stay on Venmo for a while, that is the account type built for selling seats.

For keeping those regulars coming back after the move, see our guide to repeat event attendance.

Test four things with a real booking before you commit: how the tool takes money up front, where a guest’s allergy ends up, what happens when a seat frees up, and how a refund works. Book a seat as a guest, add a fake allergy, cancel, and watch what each side sees.

One more check that no tool does for you. Selling food, and especially serving alcohol, at a paid dinner can be regulated where you live. Before you sell seats, check with your local health department and your state alcohol regulator.

A supper club has two kinds of rules: the house rules you set for guests, such as booking and paying ahead, a cancellation policy, dietary needs by a deadline, the arrival time, the drinks policy and a shared table, and the laws on selling food and alcohol where you host, which your state and city set; there is no national supper club rulebook. This is a list of things to check, not legal or tax advice.

Write the house rules down and show them before guests pay: the time doors open and dinner starts, what is included, whether to bring drinks, the date dietary needs are due, and what happens if a guest cancels a week before or the day before. One published example: Plated Dish asks for 72 hours’ notice of a cancellation, otherwise the seat is paid in full unless it can be resold, and lets guests transfer their seat to someone else.

• Food. In the US, state, local and tribal regulators write the rules for selling food to the public, and most model them on the FDA Food Code, whose 2026 edition is current. Ask your local health department what permit a paid dinner needs, and whether your kitchen qualifies.
• Cooking at home. California has allowed a microenterprise home kitchen operation, a small restaurant in a private home, since January 1, 2019, but only where the city or county has opted in and issued a health permit. Elsewhere, ask before you sell seats from your own kitchen.
• Alcohol. Selling drinks, or including them in the seat price, is regulated by your state alcohol regulator. Ask them, including whether guests may bring their own at a paid event; some supper clubs are bring-your-own because they hold no alcohol license.
• Tax. If you run the dinners as a part-time business, the IRS generally treats you as self-employed: you work out your net profit, income minus business expenses, and may owe income tax and self-employment tax. Ask your state tax agency whether seat sales are taxable.
• The price you advertise. Show the full price, fees included, before guests pay; the fees section above covers the FTC rule for live-event tickets.

If your dinners already sell out to the same regulars, offer priority booking before you sell a membership, and cap how many members you take so they cannot fill every seat. The worked example, with member seats and how many members they support, is in our guide to building a paid community.

SocialLoop is a tool for running events and a community in one place. For a supper club, the parts that help are specific. A hidden ticket tier opens with a code you send your regulars. An approval-gated tier lets you choose who gets a seat, and a paid request is charged only when you approve it. Custom questions on each event collect dietary needs, and answers carry over for returning guests. You can import the list you built from Venmo and DMs, email your guests, and check them in at the door.

It does not take deposits, run timed early-access windows, move a freed seat to the next person automatically, or apply a refund schedule for you. If those matter most, choose a tool that does. Plan limits apply, and the pricing page lists them.