Courtnee Futch Turned A Sold-Out Dinner Party Into a Sold-Out Multi-City Tour

"A seat at the table" has been repeated so often it barely registers anymore. On a recent Tuesday night in Atlanta, it meant something specific. A woman flew in from Philadelphia for the day to sit at one of Courtnee Futch's dinners.

She had tried to get tickets to the Brown Butter Supper Club's first tour, which sold out at every stop, and missed the Maryland dates. She kept trying for Atlanta. When tickets finally went on sale, she told her friends to buy theirs because she was buying hers regardless, and she would go alone if she had to. She had never attended a dinner. She booked the flight, the hotel and the rental car on the strength of a feeling.

The Brown Butter Supper Club is a woman-led, seated dinner experience founded by Futch, its head chef. Every dinner has a theme and unfolds over seven courses, with multiple dishes in each course. The menu includes a complimentary set of three cocktails, each custom curated and coordinated to fit the theme. None of it is an afterthought: Futch curates the food and the drinks together, dinner by dinner, and hosts several themed dinners a year.

Asked what it means that someone would travel that far for a single night, Futch does not reach for a polished answer. "I don't fully sit with it because I will cry," she says. "I hope I never stop being blown away by the idea that people are arranging babysitters, booking a flight, which is money. Booking a hotel, also money."

The standard runs in both directions. "I believe the people who live right down the street should get the same great experience that the people who travel in for it," she says. As for the ones who travel: "I imagine that it was people who were really hungry for some representation of this in their community. And then my job is to make sure that community delivers."

The dinners began in Atlanta in 2024. At first, "what I was hoping for was to create a bunch of me's," Futch says, "and put us at a dinner table together." By November 2024, "it was no longer a homogenous group." The table kept widening, and Atlanta dinners sold out again and again.

In 2026, on the heels of the series' two-year anniversary, Futch took the menu on the road. Her first multi-city tour stopped in Los Angeles, DC, Baltimore, Brooklyn and Chicago before finishing back in Atlanta. She chose hubs with strong Black populations on purpose, to connect with communities beyond Atlanta.

The idea started with the people who could not make it to Atlanta. Futch had built a community online, and so many of its members were willing to travel in that she decided to bring the dinners to them and cultivate community in their cities. The tour sold out at every stop.

That is what makes the tour more than a hospitality story. A meal is one of the few settings where a room full of strangers is asked to do the same thing at the same time, and a seven-course menu stretches that shared experience across an entire evening. A theme gives the table something to talk about before anyone has said a word. Repeat that in city after city, and a dinner becomes a way for like-minded people to find each other.

Around the table itself, Futch is specific about what a dinner is supposed to do. As she describes it, it promises three things and can only guarantee two. "You meet someone new, and then sure, you try something new. Those are the two basic things that we can guarantee will happen as long as you're just a little bit willing. But the third one requires audience participation in a way that we just can't predict, which is you're supposed to be trying to learn something new about yourself." Maybe, she says, you find you are "more open to friendship than you originally thought."

She sees her role as "the facilitator of guest-to-guest relationships." Once the room is set, "people find their little bridges, and they connect that way."

The philosophy extends past the guest list. She hosts her Atlanta dinners inside local restaurants that would otherwise be closed, keeping their bartenders and servers on the schedule, employing a restaurant's chef as her kitchen manager for the night and bringing in her own dishwasher. "We're not burning out your labor force," she says. She points guests back to those restaurants afterward. "I feel very proud about that as an Atlantan," she says. "Being able to drive people to these places."

September at CIVIC is about food fueling community, and about the people shifting culture by making the table the starting point. Courtnee Futch is at the top of that list. CIVIC considers her a culture shifter, and the proof is in the seats: a woman-led dinner series that started as a sold-out night in Atlanta, became a sold-out six-city tour, and keeps giving like-minded strangers a reason to sit down together.

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