Underground dining club PlaceInvaders “invaded” a historic home in Phoenix’s Coronado District this weekend, offering diners a unique Phoenix experience in the pop-up dining fad.
Katie Smith-Adair, former Phoenix resident and co-founder of PlaceInvaders, said she wanted to launch in Phoenix because of the beautiful historic districts.
“Having been a student here and living here, I knew what I loved,” Smith-Adair said. “It felt like a fun place to come and try it out.”
The premise behind PlaceInvaders is to host elaborate dinners in different places at an exclusive price. So far, the company has only had dinners in New York, but Phoenix is its first break into the national market. Smith-Adair and her business partner Hagan Blount founded the company just over a year ago.
“PlaceInvaders started as a monthly series of events,” Smith-Adair said. “Our first event was in a very cool but very small apartment. We only had six people.”
Smith-Adair added the idea of the event is meant to be very underground.
“You don’t know the address of where you’ll be eating until the day of,” she said.
At Sunday’s dinner, Smith-Adair and Blount hosted 12 people for their final Phoenix event. The five-course meal featured unlimited wine and prickly pear and elderflower cocktails.
The most popular courses of the night were the avocado strawberry salad with arugula and a hemp seed cilantro dressing and the slow-cooked beef short ribs with gremolata and marjoram carrots.
“It was an amazing meal,” Phoenix-area nurse Shareen Hollenbach said. “I would do it every weekend.”
Other courses included a nicoise salad bite with potato, quail egg, tuna, haricots vert and a black olive, homemade orecchiette pasta with anchovy butter and Sriracha sauce, and a coconut panna cotta with a spicy mango topping.
Rick May, an independent salesman, said the pop-up dining created a “whole new experience for people” that offered an opportunity to branch out in the community.
“My biggest (concern) was that I’m so picky and weird about food,” May said. “But I liked everything I was served.”
Belen Boll, a supervisor of guest services for the Arizona Cardinals, lives in the Coronado District close to where the event was held and said she wanted to spread the word about PlaceInvaders coming to Phoenix.
“I feel lucky that we get (PlaceInvaders) right here in the Coronado,” Boll said. “I want to pay homage and respect to these guys traveling across the country to cook. It’s just amazing.”
Though the day was rainy, Boll said she was “ready with a golf umbrella” to experience the food and the atmosphere PlaceInvaders offers.
“It’s a lot of fun,” Smith-Adair said. “It’s unique and it has a good vibe to it. People feel like they’re let in on secrets by being here.”
Next, Smith-Adair and Blount will be invading Beverly Hills, but the couple hopes to return to Phoenix in the future.
When discussing the event with guests after the meal, Smith-Adair said they have already received invitations from diners from earlier events to host the next ones.
“We need to figure out a way to keep these going,” Blount said. “We like to keep it small because this is the kind of atmosphere we like.”
Hollenbach said she is happy she came to the event and looks forward to PlaceInvaders’ return to Phoenix.
“You feel like you’re at home here,” she said. “It’s a really nice feeling.”
Contact the reporter at ntyau@asu.edu.
