The Supper Club: Ritual, Resistance, and the $800 Table
An evening at Rocca Tampa
Twenty-four years on construction sites have taught me one truth: a blueprint is just a polite suggestion until the dirt starts moving. You can plan for luxury, pay for the promise of a place like the Sheraton Brandon, and still find yourself standing in a dim hallway at midnight with a $439 room key, no working coffee shop, and a TV remote that doesn’t exist. When the foundation fails, you don’t sulk—you pivot.
That’s exactly what Chrissy and I did. We left the overgrown landscaping behind and went looking for the Saturday night we actually wanted. What started as a loose idea became something sharper: the Supper Club. Not just dinner. A deliberate ritual of intentional abundance.
We landed at Rocca Tampa. After the sterile disappointment of the hotel, walking into that room felt like arriving somewhere earned. Our server, Jayden, didn’t just recite specials—he told us the story of the building and the chef’s Michelin-starred path. You could feel the shift the moment we sat down.
We’d planned for eight. Two couldn’t make it. That left six of us around the table: Janet and Joe dressed to the nines, Chris and Julia sliding in just behind them, Chrissy and me anchoring one end. The energy was already humming before the first drink arrived.
The real door to the evening was the Mozzarella Cart. I’ve watched crews pour concrete and set steel with exacting precision for decades, but there’s something different about watching fresh mozzarella pulled and shaped tableside, right at your elbow. It was theater and craft at once. For a few minutes, the six of us simply watched and talked as that cheese became dinner. That shared moment of care is what I wanted the Supper Club to be.
On my left wrist sat my Longines Master Collection Year of the Horse—the deep red lacquer dial marking my birth year. A serious watch, yet no one mentioned it. Jayden didn’t notice. My friends didn’t comment. That quiet anonymity pleased me. It wasn’t there to impress the room. It was a private reminder of precision on a night that had begun with things falling apart.
The next day, that search for precision continued at Montblanc. I spent forty-five minutes talking with Andrew, who showed me a rugged $25,000 mountaineering watch before turning to the pens. I’ve used good pens before. These were something else entirely—weighty, smooth, almost hovering above the paper with no drag, no resistance. Just pure glide. They made me want to sit down and actually write something worth keeping.
By the time the bill came—$806.82 for the dry-aged Rohan duck, the Bistecca, and the pastas we shared—the Supper Club had already become more than a meal. It was proof that you can build a small, deliberate pocket of richness even when the larger day tries to disappoint.
Later that weekend, between bars of soap and dodging imposter colognes at a thrift store, I found three Connie Francis vinyl records for two dollars each. A $3,600 Longines at a Michelin-starred table. Two-dollar records on a dusty shelf. To some, that looks like a contradiction. To me, it’s the only honest way to live.
You build the room. You pull up the chair. You pay attention to the details that endure.
The needle is already down. Rocca was the occasion. The ritual is the life.
— Jaime