Recipes from French & Grace of the Salad Club The kitchen is where our story begins. It was at our kitchen tables, a short cycle from one another in Brixton, south London, that the idea for Salad Club came about. It was here that our first hearty salads were shared and our blog was created as a means of sharing recipes with each other the next day; we had no idea people would actually bother to read it. A month or so later Ellie's flat above the buzzing market on Electric Avenue became home to our famous secret suppers, where 30 strangers would come to eat three or four courses of home-made food every couple of Saturdays. Donations would be submitted in tobacco tins on the table, wine flowed interminably and our friends played waitresses. As the calypso and blues hummed on, our bric-à-brac bistro of a restaurant united the city's strangers through food. Every Saturday that we hosted our supper club was a challenge to our repertoire and an impetus to invent and try out new recipes that would feed large groups from a small galley kitchen. We are untrained cooks with busy lives and do not feel precious or fetishistic about food. This is about how we eat, a style that is born of our living above, being fed by - and starting a supper club from - a busy street market. Last summer we took the bold, and slightly mad, move towards having our own premises and set to work converting a butcher's shop in Brixton Village into a 20-seater kitchen-restaurant, called French & Grace. We have sought to keep intact the friendly, colourful approach to cooking and hosting that was so popular at our Salad Club secret restaurant.