A Tribeca Supper Club, Vegan Style

Chef Daphne Cheng (in shorts) oversees a recent dinner at her Suite ThreeOhSix, a vegan supper club on Franklin Street. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

At age 24, Daphne Cheng is the proprietor and chef of Suite ThreeOhSix, a vegan supper club that she began in May at 59 Franklin St. Guests pay $59-$79 for a one-of-a-kind, five- to seven-course vegan dinner. She spoke about her culinary life to the Trib’s April Koral.

I think about food pretty much 100 percent of my waking hours, and probably in my sleep, also.

I went to UC Berkeley for a year and dropped out after figuring out that was not the direction I wanted to go in life. My sister was in New York and she told me about a culinary school that was a year program. So I moved to New York and went there.

The supper club started out one night a week for 16 people. Now it’s grown to two nights a week for 24 people each night. I’m pretty confident in general, but there is always a fear that people aren't going to like what you serve. Sometimes if it’s a very quiet room, I get concerned because I don’t know whether they’re enjoying it.

Most times it’s not until I go to the market that I decide what to serve. I’m mostly inspired by what I see. Recently, I saw kale and snow fungus and I thought they would be really interesting together because they have a similar curly look and would play on each other.

When I’m creating a dish, I can imagine what it tastes like in my head. Even though I haven’t had dairy in eight or nine years, I like to recreate it because  I loved cheese and yogurt. For example, I make a roasted cauliflower dish with house-made yogurt made of almond milk and arrowroot that creates the same flavor and texture and mouth-feel that I remember from dairy yogurt.

For the supper club, I mostly only try the individual components, not the whole dish. I don’t really experience that until my staff and I eat together at the end.

Sometimes I’m surprised at how good it is, better than I actually imagined and that’s a great thing. Then sometimes I feel like I could have done a lot better.

I was anorexic for a few years when I was a teenager. I wouldn’t eat over 500 calories a day. It was definitely a mental disorder. A lot of people blame eating disorders on the media and images of very skinny models, but for me it was more about being perfect and having a very warped view of my body.

What got me out of it was I saw a picture of myself and I was just freaked. My face was sunken and you could see bones everywhere. That’s when I became vegan, which really helped me because food wasn’t the enemy anymore. I learned that food can be nourishing, and didn’t have to be something fattening and make you feel guilty.

Deep down I want people to become vegan, but I’m not going to be in your face with animal rights and environmental stats. I’m mostly here to show you that vegetables are delicious in their own right and hopefully you’ll incorporate more in your diet, and by default that means less meat.

I cooked meat once in my life when I still ate it. I thought it shouldn't be that big of a deal, but I was pretty grossed out by the whole experience. I wouldn’t be a chef if I weren’t vegan.