Fine Dining Club
Astarya is a fine dining club that offers a unique dining experience in the most exclusive locations in Europe and beyond.
Apply now to see if you qualifyA private dining club across Europe. By application.
We pick the restaurant and compose the table, and then you arrive.
Most ways of eating dinner with new people are built around a single night. The social-eating apps and the meetup groups sit six strangers down together, split the bill, and send everybody home to people they will never see again.
Astarya runs on the opposite principle. The same faces come back, in your city and in other people's cities, until "my restaurant people" stops being a thing you wish you had.
Two people walk into the same three-star restaurant on the same night. The first has read the reviews, orders the two dishes everybody photographs, drinks a glass of something reliable, and leaves ninety minutes later having had a very good dinner at a sensible price. The second takes the full tasting menu with the pairing and settles in for three hours, because they want the kitchen to make its entire argument from the first bite to the last.
The first one optimized the evening. The second one maximized it, and that second instinct is what we select for.
It shows up in small ways once you're inside. Our dinners run long, nobody at the table is working out whether the wine justified its markup, and when the kitchen offers to send out one more thing the answer is always yes. If your instinct at a great restaurant is to get the most out of it rather than the best deal from it, you'll recognize the room the moment you sit down.
Work comes up. Somebody always asks what you do, and by the third course you'll have a rough idea of how everyone at the table earns a living, because that is how conversation between adults goes. Then it moves on, back to the plate, the glass, the odd thing the chef did with the celery, the place in San Sebastián somebody went to last spring.
What we protect against is the person who came for the room instead of the table. We meet for the food, the wine, and the hours that happen around them, and we're strict about it because one person working the table spoils the evening for everybody else.
Hand out business cards, or try to sell something to the person sitting next to you, and it will be your last dinner with us.
Your background and your passport are your business, and they make no difference to us. What matters is that people who met forty minutes ago can spend four hours in easy conversation, and at a table where everybody arrived from somewhere different, English is what makes that possible. So you need to be comfortable in it, comfortable enough to argue about a wine list, though nobody is grading your grammar.
The club moves around Europe, and members travel to each other's dinners more often than you'd expect, because a restaurant you've wanted to try for three years is a perfectly good reason to spend a weekend somewhere.
That instinct is where this is heading next. For members who want it, we're building longer stays around the tables worth crossing a border for.
You fill in the form and we read it. A table holds a fixed number of chairs, so we open the doors in small batches, and you'll hear from us when the next one opens.
There are two criteria and we'll be straight about both. The first is your profile, meaning whether you're the sort of company a table like this deserves. The second is our own judgment, which we don't outsource and don't explain in detail.
Nobody pays to belong here. Once you're accepted you'll see the calendar, with the restaurant and the price of each evening, and you book the ones you want. Sit out a whole season and you'll owe us nothing.
There's one rule about attendance and it comes down to arithmetic. A table holds a fixed number of chairs and there are always people waiting for one. If you stop showing up over a long stretch, we'll pass your place to somebody who has been asking for it.
Four quick answers.
The form takes a few minutes. We read all of them, and we'll write to you when the next round of doors opens, usually twice a year. If it turns out to be a fit, your first dinner will be the fastest three hours you've spent in a long time.
P.S. If there's a restaurant you've been putting off for two years because there was nobody to go with, that gap is the entire reason this club exists. The form is just above.