madeline walter

A few weeks after the anniversary of her mother’s death, Ronni Minnis received an email invitation to Sweet Antelope, a storytelling-themed supper club. The evening’s theme was grief, a subject that felt especially poignant to Minnis as she continued to mourn her mother. After a meditation in an attic, she sat down to an elaborate candlelit dinner and shared stories of her grief with strangers. “It was extraordinary,” she says.

The experience left Minnis eager to return. Tonight, she’s back, this time with her husband, Michael Minnis, whose birthday she’s celebrating in an unusual way. She surprised him by bringing him to the supper club. “Surprise! You’re spending your birthday with strangers,” she jokes at the dinner table, where pink dahlias cut from the home garden fill the table.

A card of intention burns in the fire at the Sweet Antelope supper club hosted by Kristina Robbins.

A guest reads a dinner placard.

Tonight’s theme is “goodbye,” setting the stage for conversations that veer into the provocative and sentimental, moving beyond pleasantries and small talk.

Kristina Robbins created Sweet Antelope in 2023, hosting the storytelling-based supper club in her West Adams home. Each month, she invites mostly strangers to share personal stories over four-course meals prepared with ingredients from her garden and local farms. “All the herbs from last night were from my garden. All the flowers were from my garden,” she says.

Robbins has always loved throwing parties. When her children moved out, she began wondering where to direct her energy. Sweet Antelope became an outlet for her passion for hosting and an expression of her belief that people need deeper connections with one another through storytelling. The name originated from a nickname her husband gave her — an adorable little creature, yet one that still wields its horns.

Guests huddle by a fire in the backyard at the Sweet Antelope Supper Club.

“We’ve really forgotten that, as human beings, we are wired to ground ourselves through our connection to other people,” she says.

For Robbins, the dinners offer something beyond good food and conversation. At a time when she sees people becoming increasingly reluctant to talk to strangers, Sweet Antelope creates space for vulnerability that she believes many people’s lives lack.

“This was the most perfect expression of what I feel is missing from a lot of people’s lives, and I felt uniquely able to offer it,” she adds.

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1. Guido Lois prepares dinner during the Sweet Antelope supper club. 2. Short ribs. 3. Seasonal soup.

Guests arrive beneath bougainvillea vines bursting with vivid pink blooms and are ushered through Robbins’ historic Craftsman-style home, built in 1908 and owned by her family since 2014. In the kitchen, chefs prepare an elaborate four-course meal. Outside, guests sip blackberry tequila spritzes and explore the garden before joining a ritual tied to the evening’s theme: Each receives a wooden totem and tosses it into the fire pit as a symbolic goodbye to something in their life.

Eleanor Bigelow and Tom Paper traveled from San Francisco to attend the supper club. They had met Kristina 30 years earlier through an improv troupe in San Francisco. “She was super talented and the kind of person who you remember after 30 years,” says Bigelow.

Cards of intention are available for guests as they arrive.

As performers who had toured a show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, they were intrigued when they heard about an event that married a culinary experience with storytelling. “We decided to come here because we both are really into organic food and the idea of learning to be better storytellers,” says Bigelow.

Tonight’s featured storyteller is Madeline Walter, who co-runs the popular storytelling show “Essays” with her brother, Evan Walters. Robbins reached out to the siblings and invited Madeline to read at tonight’s supper club.

“It felt very similar to ‘Essays’ in that she is interested in building a community and an exciting live event that is just not what you see every day,” says Walter.

Before introducing the storyteller, Robbins explains that after she announces the theme, every guest will have a chance to tell their own story at dinner. The dinner, she says, is a chance to “connect with people over something other than what we do for a living and where our kids go to school.”

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1. Guests listen to Madeline Walters read an essay. (Lauren Justice/For The Times) 2. Madeline Walters shares a story at Sweet Antelope.

Madeline takes the stage and begins reading her essay about imagining her “Manhattan-feral” husband’s life in the event of her untimely death. She mainly envisions that her husband would not “know where we keep the majority of things in our home.” It elicits laughter from the dinner party guests. “I need to announce that I’m leaving to open myself up and remind myself that time is limited, and I can operate with a little more freedom,” she concludes.

After the reading, guests make their way to one of three candlelit tables inside the Craftsman home. Each person has an assigned seat and a number indicating when it’s their turn to share a story. A placard on the table offers prompts to start the conversation: “Tell us about a goodbye you’ll never forget.”

For Robbins, the moments that follow reveal something special about the gatherings. When strangers sit together and move beyond small talk, she says, unexpected connections can emerge. “We share experiences that become launching pads for conversation,” she says. “Some people go funny, some people go deep.”

No matter where guests sit, they’ll have a memorable conversation, Robbins explains. “At the end of the night, people will come up to me, and they’ll be like, ‘How did you know to seat me at that table?’ ” she says. “Everyone is convinced that they had the best table.”

Meanwhile, in the kitchen, chefs put the finishing touches on a melon, cucumber and tomato salad as guests prepare to share their own stories. What began as a small culinary operation has grown into a team of chefs who bring their own influences to the menu. “I hire on vibes — if they’re fun, have a great attitude and have a nurturing, calm presence, and are talented at what they do,” says Robbins.

Guests Nicole Montez, from left, Kerry Nicole and Terry Solomon have a good laugh.

Like the evening’s theme, the menu tells a story. From the melon salad to curried tomato soup and black garlic short rib (which one guest exclaims is “insane!”), each dish reflects a deliberate choice. “We are at the end of the melon season, so I definitely knew I wanted to do a melon dish before they disappeared,” says Robbins.

Her intimate dinners have garnered fans in the culinary world. Daphne Brogdon, who once co-owned the beloved Los Angeles restaurant Tar Pit and helped run operations at the legendary Campanile, is a longtime friend and one of tonight’s guests. “I think what she’s doing is even more important than ever,” says Brogdon, who believes that supper clubs can be an antidote to loneliness. “There’s a premium for being in real life.”

At the dinner tables, conversation flows freely, veering from cathartic discussions of women’s boundaries and dispatches from the psychic realm to memories of departed loved ones and a bizarre encounter with a disgraced rock star that elicits giggles and bewilderment. Fleetwood Mac plays softly in the background. Wine flows.

As the meal winds down, guest Katelyn Hindin says she doesn’t believe in goodbyes. “I think goodbyes are treated with reverence that they shouldn’t be,” she says before revealing a bittersweet story about a lost family member.

The supper club is hosted in a stunning L.A. Craftsman home built in 1908.

One of the dinner party guests, Mark Chervinsky, shares a story about receiving an organ transplant, which inspired him to start a nonprofit, Mark Here 4 Life, that advocates for organ donation after he connected with the mother of his donor.

Shortly afterward, Robbins floats through the room to invite guests into the garden for salted caramel pots de crème and lemon balm tea, “grown and dried here,” she adds.

Under the stars, guests swap numbers while sipping from toasty mugs. “The event was more profound than I ever expected, and a really wonderful way to get to know people very quickly,” says Jessica Hernández as she prepares to say her own reluctant goodbye.

Sweet Antelope’s next Storytelling Supper Club is Dec. 5, 5-9:30 p.m. Tickets are $185.