Before the nipples are revealed, there are appetizers to consider.
Seated soberly on a couch in a lounge filled with couches, I am greeted by a young server in a prim white button-down and black pants. She dips to my level, and asks if I would like to try the starter — though she’s clearly unsure of what she’s offering: “It’s a pear,” she guesses, smiling hopefully.
Except what I’m looking at is a fig — salaciously split open, splayed atop lithe avocado purée, sprinkled with perky sesame seeds, and topped with an erect sprout of arugula. Though our server skipped Aphrodisiac 101, she is not here to be a food expert. She’s here for a first course of foreplay.
Chris Hubbard, the 61-year-old founder and chef of the city’s longest-running erotic dinner party, laughs at the retelling. “It’s what you get when the servers are all volunteers.”
Fifteen years in, Our Gourmet Life has enjoyed a longer life than most San Francisco restaurants. Hosted in Hubbard’s red-velvet-clad home located on a funky SoMa alley, dinners here are part theater, part tasting menu, part free-for-all. Most of the staff are enthusiastic volunteers, and many have been doing it for years. Guests, who range from hedge fund managers to cops, pay up to $325 for seven courses with wine pairings, and the promise of a good time.
The evenings feel like an amalgam of “Eyes Wide Shut” (the servers, both men and women, wear black eye masks) and “9½ Weeks” (think chocolate sauce). Similarly, the ambitious, if homespun, menu feels like a bit like a throwback to ’90s fine dining. The night I attend, there’s a purée of roasted butternut squash soup, white asparagus with hollandaise, and passionfruit lollipops as palate cleansers — a great excuse for performative licking.
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At each table, the evening’s menu is printed in flowery script with kissy lipstick prints all over and dramatically sealed with a wax stamp of a cock (the poultry kind). There is a little wink to this.
According to Hubbard, the guests on this particular evening are typical Our Gourmet Lifers — a friendly, mostly hetero mix of newbies and seasoned enthusiasts. Most are couples trying to spice things up. There are a few straitlaced-looking empty-nesters, dressed for a big night at a Vegas hotel. The wife of a younger couple — their children parked with the grandparents — tells me she was shocked and delighted when her husband, who presents as a computer engineer, surprised her with the dinner.
The woman next to me, a warm ER doctor who quickly strips down to pretty lingerie, is nine months pregnant. She’s with her husband, who practices shibari (Japanese rope bondage) and offers up his services. Though he arrives in a top hat, he removes it when things start to get heated.
“When I bring people to attend, they’re thinking ‘50 Shades of Grey,’ but there’s also like a cheese platter.”
The parents-to-be are celebrating the few hours they have left before the buzzkill of changing diapers, but have attended Our Gourmet Life many times, both as guests and staff members. “Chris does a good job with a system of consent, so it creates a pretty safe structure,” the wife tells me later over the phone, while breastfeeding her newborn.
“Things are very sexy without having any expectations that sex or sexual things will even happen. It’s actually pretty wholesome. When I bring people to attend, they’re thinking ‘50 Shades of Grey,’ but there’s also like a cheese platter.”
Consent is indeed an integral part of the menu. On the table are small cards, which diners can flip up or down to silently signal how much they want to participate with the servers who, as the night progresses, mix, mingle, and entangle, in various states of undress. For those not already entrenched in San Francisco’s vibrant sex-party scene, the dinner provides a relatively vanilla amuse bouche. OK, maybe vanilla with a swirl — think more burlesque theater than outright orgy.
“Dining is a safe forum that everyone understands,” says Hubbard, who — with glasses, a gray beard, and a proper little chef belly — has the thoughtful, soft-spoken demeanor of a philosophy professor. He notes that, compared to the queer community, straight people actually have fewer options for this kind of play. And the structure of a dinner provides a familiar entree. “You can hide behind your salad if you want to,” he says.
It is notable, however, that once the initial awkwardness lifts, I don’t see a single person trying to disappear into their Little Gems. If anything, no one is all that intent on eating.
To understand why this party exists at all, you have to go back to the Oakland Hills, circa 2010, to a dinner Hubbard never meant to repeat.
In those days, he had participated in alternative communities many would label culty, including the now infamous orgasmic meditation group, One Taste (which he now would prefer to distance himself from), and the controversial company focused on the idea of “personal development,” Landmark Education (opens in new tab) (now Landmark Worldwide (opens in new tab)), where he was a yacht captain for founder Werner Erhard.
But he also had fluorescent-lit, soul-sucking office jobs as a programmer. His wife, Beth Aucoin, a yoga instructor who’s deep into blues fusion dance and helps out with the parties, recalls Hubbard’s “mopey” corporate days. As an antidote, she brought him to the French Laundry for dinner, but they found the whole experience … stiff.
“We thought it would be less uptight if the servers, most of whom were men, were naked — it would just make our experience that much richer,” she jokes. However, they liked the food, and subsequently bought Thomas Keller’s book, which Hubbard began to cook from at weekly parties.
Then, during a six-year throuple relationship, their third partner requested a birthday dinner party with friends, where they could all “flirt shamelessly without consequence.” Hubbard took on a “grotesquely ambitious” 16-course menu. Beth and their girlfriend played servers, dressed in lacy aprons and little else, ferrying plates. By the time Hubbard was onto the lobster, guests were having sex on the table. He ducked back into the kitchen. “I thought, I don’t know what the hell this is, but it’s not just a dinner party,” he says.
The next morning, the calls started to come in: When’s the next one? Can I bring friends? Within weeks, he had a following. Suddenly, Hubbard — who insists he barely knew how to cook back then — found himself running a culinary-erotic supper club. “Today we’re in the business of creating joy through theater and through food, and that’s sadly very uncommon,” he said.
Since then, Hubbard left corporate life behind and has made Our Gourmet Life his full-time gig, refining his culinary prowess along the way. He’s the guy who goes to a Michelin three-star restaurant like Benu and warns the server that he’s going to be asking a lot of questions.
However, Hubbard receives requests from his guests that would challenge even the most lauded chef. “I’ve cast I don’t know how many molds, so that the servers could offer guests a chance to eat a chocolate version of their actual nipple,” he said. One woman who was “well endowed” wanted her breasts made into crème brûlée. Hubbard used gelatin to give the recipe more stability and created a shield so he could take a blowtorch to caramelize the nipples. “While everyone was enjoying the dessert, she announced that they were her actual boobs. She felt like a queen. It was so fun — I loved that,” he said.
One maid of honor at a bachelorette party requested that tiramisu be eaten directly off of the bride-to-be.
“So I made a big sheet pan of it. But I had to ask her, ‘You know what‘s about to happen? It’s cold as hell and it’s gonna hit you like a thump.’ She was like, ‘Bring it.’ So I just dumped the entire thing onto her naked body and the entire room just leapt at her. I was lucky to get out of there with my hands.”
“We did a private dinner where we put a mattress on the table and people had sex on it while everyone else sat around with their food. So, yeah — nobody ate.”
No matter how much time Hubbard puts into his menus — and it’s hours and hours, in a very small, residential kitchen — his ego has to remain in check. The truth is, sometimes his food is all but forgotten. “Once, I looked up and couldn’t see most of the female guests. It turned out they were under the table performing oral sex on their partners. I think it was probably one of the first times I had to wonder if I should send out the next course.’”
Iterating over the years has led Hubbard to create some boundaries. “Once we did a private dinner where we put a mattress on the table and people had sex on it while everyone else sat around the table with their food. So, yeah — nobody ate.” Today’s dinners have purposefully sturdy tables which can safely allow a server to, say, shimmy across one in order to refill a guest’s wine.
Today, Hubbard’s dinners are divided into introductory and intermediate. The latter comes with “caviar service,” wherein guests are invited to have a seat and choose a consenting server to eat caviar and creme fraiche off of. Should you be wondering — it’s all waist up, second-base stuff.
Guests however, can do as they please with each other. And they do.
The night I attended my first Our Gourmet Life, it was a relatively small, intimate dinner party. But on another Friday evening, when I arrive to observe the kitchen, the dinner is at capacity. It’s intermediate night. There are 25 guests (including the “Vegas hotel” couple who loved it so much they’ve returned), 13 scantily clad servers, and five cooks.
The second floor, where all the action is happening, comprises a big room with an open kitchen that flows into the dining space. Just off this is Hubbard’s actual bedroom; his bed, like at any house party, is now piled with coats.
The lights are low and the scene is one of food and flesh and barely controlled chaos. Laughter, fueled by copious bottles of wine, competes with a soundtrack of Nina Simone. A few servers, mostly topless now, are doing some light grinding on each other for the benefit of the diners, giving shoulder massages, dragging nails lightly along the napes of necks. Others are tossing dirty plates into a bus tub and delivering plates of Caesar salad with basil dressing. Some seem to have temporarily lost the plot and are just hanging out in their underwear.
With little counter space, the kitchen, with a four-burner Thermador and one oven, is crammed with sheet pans, pots, pans, bus tubs, cutting boards, rags, and tongs. On a black-clothed fold-out table reserved for plating, a cook is using a squeeze bottle to dot the first course — asparagus with kalamata-olive caramel and almonds — with a yogurt sauce made sunny with saffron.
The six-top table closest to the kitchen includes three couples in elegant suits and dresses. They could be dining at Cotogna — if the women weren’t all straddling their partners. Wearing stilettos and a flouncy, open-slit skirt, one woman is making out with a server with dreadlocks and well-groomed chest hair. Another guy, who minutes ago had on a tie and button-down, now has his shirt off and his face buried in his partner’s breasts. On the other side of the room, what sounds like applause turns out to actually be some bare-buttock spanking.
By this point, the room is appropriately smoky; the cheese from the lasagne being prepped for the staff meal has dripped onto the oven floor. Like true professionals, the cooks, dressed in red chef coats and black, pin-striped aprons, are paying little attention to anything but the miso-glazed sea bass. Hubbard checks in with Aucoin, who is working as a server, to ask how things are going from her vantage point. “It’s going perfectly,” she says. “Things are devolving.”
Despite the scene surrounding them — zero of the cooks are gawking. They’re head down, frantically making sure dinner is coursed in a timely manner, fussing over plating, teasing one another, and cheering when the basil-vinaigrette turns out right.
Among what appears to be a group of misfits, there’s a lot of camaraderie. A developer with deep ties to the polyamorous community, who — along with his girlfriend, now dressed in a harness and working the tables — has handmade 150 goat cheese-and-roasted fig tortellini. There’s a new guy who’s been put on bread duty. Another cook, who works as a private chef by day, is so committed to the cause that he “drove over two bridges to be here.”
Most notably, there is Paula “Tuffy” Eldridge, 68 — an African American, church-going, 12-string guitarist, who has worked in many a kitchen and met Hubbard when she was a cheesemonger at Whole Foods. “‘I’ll be the cracker to your cheese,’ is the sweetest thing he’s ever said to me,” she says of their 10-some years cooking together. The two banter all night long. There’s a lot of, “Yes, chef.”
Eldridge, who’s sporting a red fedora decorated with a David Bowie button and a feather, hobbles a little bit. Just back from a church convention in Fairfield, she says she knows Jesus is watching, but he also wants her to have some fun.
“It’s going perfectly. Things are devolving.”
“I’ve only jumped into the dinner party twice in all these years,” she claims. “Just a little titty licking. The servers know I’m a little church lady, but they did invite me to do a cuddle puddle once.”
What she’s here for the most, however, is Hubbard: “He’s a feminist. Not to mention his cooking. Everything he does is with attention to detail and real purpose.” The developer agrees: “Chris just loves cooking and feeding people and making them happy.”
The evening is reaching its culmination. Hubbard, the consummate host, briefly musters the energy to crawl on his hands and knees to jokingly nuzzle his face between the legs of a longstanding guest. When he returns to his work, he weakly throws up his arms like he’s a runner steps from crossing a finish line. “Yay! We only have one more course and then I can go to bed.”
The dessert is a pavlova with strawberries and a 1984 French dessert wine and it will be had downstairs. The servers lead all of the guests, many now holding their shoes, back to the lounge.
Spent, Hubbard, looks around the now-silent room, littered with napkins and plates and lipstick-stained wine glasses. He never asks anyone to help clean up — this is something he’ll do himself over the next couple of days — but one server, still topless, kindly starts carrying plates into the kitchen. “My feet are killing me,” Hubbard says, assessing the night’s damage. “If I smoked weed or did coke, I’d be doing that right now. But I might just take an aspirin.”
Despite the evening’s exertions and the mountain of dirty dishes, Hubbard is satisfied. “This whole thing is about being pampered for a night — to be able to enjoy being alive before going back out to the grind,” he says. His guests clearly enjoyed themselves. And on those couches? God only knows what’s happening.