By Virginia Brown

Members of Your Farms Your Table’s Farm Cult get discounts, meals, and more. Photo courtesy

When Chef Sam Diminich of Your Farms Your Table launched his Farm Cult meal membership last year, he didn’t know what to expect. “We launched at 10 a.m., and by 11, we were running out of space,” he said. “That was a really cool moment, because you never know how the community is going to receive your ideas, but this was received really well.” 

Diminich is no stranger to the subscription-based meal model. He launched Your Farms Your Table in March 2020 to try to support local farms after he lost his job in the food and beverage industry due to the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Today, the program has roughly 65 members and includes, among other things, an in-home chef-led cooking experience, priority reservations at his soon-to-open Restaurant Constance, and two meals delivered every month. All of the ingredients are sourced within 60 miles of Charlotte (one purveyor is in Winston-Salem) and the program costs members $700 per year.

During the pandemic, with in-house dining off the table, a wide variety of meal delivery and take-out options surged. By fall 2020, more than 70 percent of 3,500 restaurant operators surveyed by the National Restaurant Association said that off-premises sales represented a higher proportion of their total business than before the pandemic. 

But while subscriptions may have helped some restaurants survive in the short-term, for many, they may not be here to stay. 

That’s because when diners pay for a restaurant meal, they tend to want the ambiance of a restaurant to go with it, according to chef Lewis Donald of Sweet Lew’s Barbecue, who began offering a subscription through Table22 a few months ago. “There’s no vibe,” he said. “No bartender, no live music—they just pick it up cold and reheat it.”

For $75 per month, subscribers of Sweet Lew’s Tasting Menu take home smoked meats and creative add-ons not available in the restaurant, like a root-vegetable gratin with house-made bacon and a parmesan crust. “It’s not brisket and ribs and mac and cheese,” he said. “I can’t sell brisket for thirty bucks a pound and then do a meal for two for seventy-five; there’s no reason to subscribe for that.” 

For it to be worth it financially, Donald says he’d need about 30 subscriptions. As of about a month ago, he had 12. “I think the world has turned back on again, in a lot of ways,” he said. “We’ll give it until December.”

The Goodyear House is in a similar boat. The popular NoDa restaurant used Table22 as a subscription platform for a time, but canceled it due to lack of interest, according to Chef Chris Coleman. He says that the restaurant plans to wait until the new year to reconsider an in-house relaunch. 

When considering committing to a subscription, diners may be looking for something more than creative takeout. 

“We think differently from most restaurateurs, at least in part, and that’s attractive to our community and the community that cares about supporting local and knowing where their food comes from,” said Chef Diminich. “That plays a large role in the way our membership launched and the level of popularity that we experienced.”