About us

Who we are

We are a small team that runs a hospitality business: hosting dinners, and serving customers. Naveh Collective has been cooking since 2020, first at Bread & Brew, a continental restaurant, and from 2021 at Namma Kitchen, an industrial catering kitchen.

Three things have been on the wall the whole time. Great food. Good community. People first. The middle one is why this page exists. We are passionate about building tools that bring a group of people together as a community, and the tools we could find for that were either enormous or nonexistent.

So Ladle Club was an internal tool, built for our own tables. We have upgraded it and turned it into something that lets an evening around a table more or less run itself.

What a service teaches you

Running a restaurant teaches you that hospitality is mostly logistics in a clean shirt. A guest sees a table, a plate, and somebody who seems glad they came. Behind that is a count, a prep list, a delivery that arrived wrong, and a decision made at four in the afternoon that nobody will ever notice if it goes right.

A private table is the same problem, smaller, and with nobody on the payroll. Somebody still has to know how many are coming, what it costs, and who has settled. When that somebody is also the person cooking, and doing it for friends rather than for money, it is the admin that wears them out. It is never the cooking.

The brief came out of our own service rather than off a whiteboard. Make the count certain. Make the cost known before anyone sits down. Write down the things that currently live in one person's head. Then get out of the way.

What it is, and what it is not

Ladle Club is the calendar, the menu, the seats and the running total for one private group. A supper club, a food club, a monthly lunch, a book group that always ends up eating. The host opens a date, decides what is happening and who sits down, and everything else follows from that.

It is not a marketplace and it is not a social network. There is no public directory of clubs and no way to join one on your own. Somebody already at the table has to let you in. That constraint is the product, not a limitation of it.

We take no advertising and we sell no data. There are no third-party trackers or analytics in the app. There is nothing for us to sell, because you are not the product and neither is your club.

About the money

A club can run on nothing but a written record. The host says what a seat costs, writes down what people handed over, and the app keeps the running total straight. No money goes near us and nothing is charged for it. That is how every club starts, and plenty of them never need more than that.

Where we have switched payments on, you can pay properly instead: a card, a local method, or a balance topped up earlier. That money moves through a regulated payment processor and lands with your host. We take a percentage of what we actually process, and nothing at all on cash a host writes down themselves. A card number never reaches us; the processor holds it.

Payments go live one country at a time, because card processing is a country-by-country business and doing it properly means being registered to do it. Until a market is switched on, clubs in it run on the written record, exactly as before.

What has not changed is whose money it is. A balance here is an agreement between people who know each other, we take no cut of an evening we had nothing to do with, and a host can correct a wrong entry in a few seconds.

Where it runs

The app and the database run on Google Firebase in the europe-west1 region in Belgium. Outbound email goes through Resend. That is the entire list of companies that touch your data, and it is written out in full on the privacy page.

Clubs run in several countries and several currencies, and nothing in the product assumes a country, a cuisine or a calendar. A club sets its own currency, its own week, and its own idea of what dinner is. That was true of the first version and it is the part we have been most careful not to lose.

Come and say hello

Write to hello@ladleclub.com. A person reads it, and often one who was on the floor the night before.

If you want a table of your own, the waiting list is the faster route. And if you are ever near one of our kitchens, come and eat with us instead.