A few weeks before his supper club, Pith, started up again, Jonah Reider was in his spotless new kitchen, toying with a new idea: marrying the barnyard heft of bone marrow with the earthiness of just-in-season morels.
“Yo dog,” he texted the next day, the bone marrow turned out to be “so dank.”
Yes, chef!
“Dank” is not the preferred encomium of the Michelin-star set or the aspirants for the Bocuse d’Or. But it is a term of highest praise for Mr. Reider, the wiry, frenetic young chef behind the D.I.Y. supper club. Unlike many chefs laboring in the trenches, Mr. Reider is 23 and fresh out of Columbia University, where Pith began as fancy food on Ikea plates served in his dorm room.
That is a story too good to resist, even if Mr. Reider hopes that you will. “I would prefer not to be called the ‘dorm-room chef,’ if you feel me,” he said. “I’m always sensitive about people being like, ‘Oh, that’s hilarious, you were cooking in a dorm!’”
It has been 18 months since a review in The Columbia Daily Spectator put Pith on the map (“Need a new date-night spot? Look no further than Hogan Hall, Suite 4B”), but that’s long enough for Mr. Reider to have journeyed from plucky undergraduate to a news media darling.