FOLEY, Ala. — The Chicago Street Supper Club is returning to downtown Foley, and organizers have announced the five local chefs who will each lead a course of the evening.
The event features a cocktail hour followed by a four-course dinner served outdoors under the lights of the downtown district. The menu has not yet been released, but reservations are already open.
The South Baldwin Chamber of Commerce is organizing the supper club. The exact date is expected to be announced alongside the menu reveal.
The Chefs
Cocktail hour: Matt Palamara of the Gulf Coast Culinary Institute at Coastal Alabama Community College.
Appetizer: Jonathan Kastner, who works with Gulf Shores City Schools.
Salad: Lauren and Brandi Stallworth of SugarLove at The HUB.
Entree: O’Veigh McArthur of the Foley Brunch & Supper Club.
Dessert: Jackson Gainey of Jesse’s On The Bay in Fort Morgan.
Organizers say the lineup reflects a mix of local restaurant talent and culinary education professionals, and that the chefs will bring “their creativity, craftsmanship, and signature flavors to the table.”
An Unusual Roster
The composition of this lineup is worth pausing on, because it is not what a typical chef’s dinner looks like.
Two of the five come from outside conventional restaurant kitchens. Palamara teaches at a culinary institute. Kastner works with a school district.
School food service is not a background that usually appears on a multi-course dinner roster, and it probably should more often. Feeding hundreds of students daily within tight budget and nutrition constraints is a discipline in scale, consistency and cost control that most restaurant kitchens never face. A chef operating in that environment brings a different set of skills to a course than one accustomed to plating twenty covers a night.
Culinary education brings its own perspective — technique broken down and articulated, because it must be taught rather than simply executed.
The remaining three represent the restaurant side: a bakery and dessert operation, a brunch and supper club, and a waterfront restaurant in Fort Morgan.
Why Multi-Chef Dinners Work
Dividing a meal among several chefs produces something a single kitchen generally cannot.
In a conventional restaurant tasting menu, one chef’s sensibility runs through every course. The result is coherent, and coherence is much of the point.
A multi-chef dinner trades that coherence for range. Each course reflects a different person’s training, background and instincts. A diner moves through five distinct points of view over the course of an evening, which is a different experience than five expressions of one.
For the chefs, the format offers something too. Cooking one course rather than a full menu allows a level of attention that service volume normally prevents. And cooking alongside peers — in an industry where chefs typically work in parallel rather than together — is uncommon enough to be a draw in itself.
Dinner on the Street
The outdoor setting beneath the lights of Chicago Street has become a signature feature of the annual event.
Dining in a closed street is a specific pleasure, and its appeal has to do with the reversal involved. A street is infrastructure — a place for vehicles, crossed quickly on foot. Setting tables down its length converts it into a room, and the buildings that line it become walls. The transformation is temporary, which is part of why it registers.
Events of this kind have also become a standard tool in downtown revitalization, for a practical reason: they demonstrate what a street can be. A community that has eaten dinner in the middle of its downtown thinks differently about that downtown afterward.
Foley has been investing in exactly that direction. The city recently received a Main Street Alabama Award of Excellence for the East Jessamine Street Improvement Project, a complete-street redesign aimed at making the downtown district more walkable and better connected. Foley Main Street received a separate award for a business development program.
The Chamber’s Role
The South Baldwin Chamber of Commerce organizes the supper club, which fits a broader pattern in how chambers in tourism-heavy regions operate.
A chamber in a coastal county serves members whose business depends on the area being a place people want to spend time. Events that draw people downtown, showcase local restaurants and generate attention for the district serve that interest directly — more so than conventional business networking.
Reservations
Those interested in attending can reserve a seat through the South Baldwin Chamber of Commerce’s website. Organizers say the menu will be revealed soon, with the event date announced at the same time.
Events of this format typically have limited seating determined by the physical space, and reservations for the 2026 dinner are already open.
South Alabama News will report the date and menu when they are announced.