In Coorg, food has never been separate from the land. The forests, the estates, the spices, the change of seasons, all of it has shaped how people here have cooked and eaten for generations. Kaveri Poonacha grew up inside that connection, and started The Country Supper Club alongside two equally passionate friends, Priyanka and Kaavya, over a shared love for food and experimental cooking.

With a personal passion for food and travel, and a constant search for new conversations around both, The Country Supper Club felt like the perfect way to bring it all together around a table.

Instead of running a restaurant with a fixed address, the three of them host travelling pop-up dinners at different locations, each one built around a place, a season, and a story, drawing on the culinary traditions of the Kodava community. Every event becomes a chance to introduce guests to ingredients that are deeply local, presented in ways that feel both familiar and completely new.

Growing What She Cooks

Kaveri's relationship with food starts long before anything reaches a plate. On her estate in Virajpet, cardamom, cinnamon, and wild coriander grow around her home, not as ingredients waiting to be picked, but as living parts of the landscape she has grown up watching.

Coorg's spices are among the finest in the country, and she treats that as raw material for constant experimentation, studying how each one behaves and looking for new ways to bring out its character. To her, a spice can shift the aroma, the texture, and the colour of a dish but most of all, its flavour, and sometimes even the story it tells.

Her years in hospitality taught her something else: that a meal is not only about what lands on the table, but about how a guest discovers it.

Cooking With the Seasons

Perhaps the most striking part of this work is how closely the team pays attention to timing. In an age when almost anything is available all year round, they still hold on to something older food cultures always understood, that an ingredient has its own moment, and no other, set by Coorg's own seasonal calendar rather than anyone's personal preference.

Take Madh Thoppu, a plant native to the Western Ghats. For most of the year, it passes for an ordinary weed, easy to overlook. But by Coorg's seasonal calendar, August is when it comes into its own, releasing a naturally vibrant purple extract long linked to traditional medicine.

This fleeting plant finds its way into payasa, puddings, and rice cakes, lending them some of the most pleasant and sometimes strikingly vibrant, shades of purple. It's a small example of how The Country Supper Club works: noticing an ingredient, understanding exactly when it's at its best, and building something around it without changing what it fundamentally is.

Rooted in Kodava Heritage, Not Reinvented

At the centre of The Country Supper Club is the food culture of the Kodava community and the idea isn't to modernise or reinvent it. The approach is to hero a Kodava dish exactly as it's meant to taste, and build layers and components around it using ingredients from Coorg. Sometimes that means marrying dishes or flavours that are usually eaten independently, and bringing them together on one plate in an unexpected way.

There's plenty of creativity in the presentation and the combinations, but the food and its flavours stay rooted in what's familiar. A seasonal plant might anchor a dessert. Two dishes eaten separately at home might arrive together on one plate. An ingredient most people would walk straight past can end up being the most memorable thing on the table. It's less about reinventing Kodava food, and more about looking at it with curiosity.

A Supper Club Without Walls

The Country Supper Club has no permanent home and that's arguably part of its charm. Each pop-up happens somewhere new, letting the food travel and the experience shift with its setting rather than asking guests to come to the same room every time.

The location changes. The season changes. The ingredients change. And so, naturally, does the menu, which means no two evenings are ever quite the same.

More Than a Meal

What Kaveri, Priyanka, and Kaavya are building through The Country Supper Club is a form of culinary exploration, looking closely at what grows around them, respecting the rhythm of the seasons, and revisiting Coorg's food traditions with curiosity rather than repetition.

Their work is a reminder that preserving a food culture doesn't mean freezing it in time. Sometimes preservation looks like curiosity instead, taking a familiar ingredient and asking a new question, understanding why a plant belongs on the table for only one month a year, growing your own spices and tasting them at every stage to find what's been overlooked.

Through their pop-ups, the team is offering people a way to taste Coorg through its land, its seasons, and its memory, proof that the story of this region isn't only found in its past. It keeps growing, season by season, on the table.

A New Menu at Watson's, Vasanthnagar

The next chapter for The Country Supper Club arrives on 24th and 25th October, with a new menu launching at Watson's, Vasanthnagar, an intimate, 15-seater meal and a new expression of everything Kaveri, Priyanka, and Kaavya have been building.

It isn't a departure from the food they grew up eating, but a closer look at it, playing with combination and presentation while staying true to the flavours, and the place, they come from.

For anyone curious to see the process behind the table, here's a glimpse of a few past evenings:

Coorg Kailpodh Lunch — watch on Instagram

Mediterranean Supper & Chasing Fireflies — watch on Instagram

Supper at The Cochin Club, During the Biennale — watch on Instagram

Asian Supper at Riverside, Coorg (December) — watch on Instagram

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Reach out on Instagram — @thecountrysupperclub