Former Birmingham resident Paco Robert, a co-founder of Dinner Lab, returned to the city for the company’s first event. Photo courtesy of Cathrine Taylor.

The name Dinner Lab conjures the image of a mad-scientist chef, feverishly testing ingredients and tweaking recipes in search of the perfect meal. The reality for the New Orleans-based pop-up supper club isn’t too far removed from that.

Co-founded by Francisco “Paco” Robert Jr., who grew up in the Birmingham suburbs of Homewood and Vestavia Hills, Dinner Lab is an ongoing experiment. And so far, so good, with business expanding as impressively as a properly prepared soufflé.

Dinner Lab has spread to 33 cities across the United States, including Birmingham, since selling its first membership in August 2012. Robert says Dinner Lab is looking to launch in Mobile and Huntsville, while Birmingham’s Dinner Lab will handle events in Tuscaloosa.

He and his business partners have even grander plans. “It is definitely a product that has international legs,” says Robert, a classically trained chef who is the company’s chief operating officer. “Things will get really interesting when we can go international.”

Dinner Lab’s story already has been plenty interesting.

As the company’s website says: “It started out as most arrest records do … on a night in New Orleans.

“We now call them our Board of Directors, but back then they were just a few hungry guys with no late-night options. Many meals and a bit of trial and error led to Dinner Lab as we know it today.”

Dinner Lab as we know it today sells annual memberships with the price varying by city ($125 for two in Birmingham). There’s a charge for each dinner ($50 to $60 in Birmingham), which includes a five-course meal, drinks, tip and taxes.

“It might not be Highlands,” Robert says, “but it’s close to it.”

That’s because Dinner Lab has recruited chefs who are “the twos and threes,” as Robert calls them, at top restaurants around the country. They work for someone else – “the ones” – but aspire to open their own restaurants.

Dinner Lab gives those chefs a chance to shine, and to get noticed. “One chef we worked with, we essentially put him on a tour of the U.S. He found investors and is now opening up a restaurant,” Robert says.

That chef, New York City’s Kwame Onwuachi, cooked Dinner Lab’s first Birmingham dinner in April.

“We gave him a platform to show what he had,” Robert says. “There’ll be more of those stories for sure. In our eyes that’s part of the mission.”

Chef Kwame Onwuachi hails from Brooklyn and has worked at top restaurants such as Eleven Madison Park and Per Se in New York City. Photo courtesy of Cathrine Taylor.

Another part of the mission is unusual for high-end food: allowing those who buy tickets to the dinners the chance to critique the chefs. As The New York Times wrote last year, “This is a surprisingly radical idea. … At the wallet-thinning end of the dining spectrum, you can send your compliments to the chef or you can shut up.”

Instead, Dinner Lab values what customers have to say. Diners receive comment cards to fill out. The cards ask them to rate each of the five courses for creativity, taste and drink pairing, and to deem whether they are “restaurant worthy.” Dinner Lab crunches the numbers. The results, along with criticisms and suggestions from customers, are shared with the chefs to help them learn. That can mean changing or even jettisoning a poor-performing recipe.

Dinner Lab boasts another radical idea, this one birthed from frantic necessity. The company began like many pop-ups – renting space from restaurants to hold events during off hours. At one early dinner, the restaurant bailed out after tickets had been sold. Robert and crew had to scramble. Fortunately, one of his good friends is a Realtor who found an old cotton mill for them to use. A concept was born: unusual venues that remain secret until 24 hours before the dinner.

Churches, banks, warehouses, theaters, a helipad, and even a new, yet-to-open bridge have hosted Dinner Lab events. The first Birmingham event took place in the long-closed Goodyear Tire Warehouse near Interstate 65 in Titusville. But Robert says the most unusual venue was a boxing gym in New Orleans.

“The kitchen was right in the boxing ring, which was really cool,” he says.

With farm-table-style seating, Dinner Lab events encourage conversation among strangers. Photo courtesy of Cathrine Taylor.

The element of the unknown extends beyond venues; dinner companions also can be a surprise. Dinner Lab serves meals farm table-style, so diners can have strangers sitting next to and across from them. Or, friends who haven’t seen each other in a long time can run into each other at an event. Robert says the social aspect of Dinner Lab is an important part of the model.

As the Dinner Lab experiment continues, Robert and partners are exploring the idea of using it as a vehicle for already established, locally well-known chefs who want to expand their brand nationally. With dozens of cities that can host dinners, a chef aiming to grow can gain exposure in those cities, which could help him launch restaurants there.

In April, Robert returned to Birmingham for the city’s first Dinner Lab event, and often visits his parents, who live in Homewood. The native of Puerto Rico began cooking with his grandmother because both his parents worked ¬– his father is a doctor and his mother an architect.

“I’d get dropped off at grandma’s house. I grew up by her side cooking all the time,” Robert said of his first cooking influence. “I remember it was my grandma who said, ‘Why don’t you become a chef?’ ”

Robert had other plans. His family moved to Alabama when he was 8. His father, Francisco “Paco” Robert Sr., took a job at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he still practices medicine. The elder Robert is a professor at UAB and chief of hematology and oncology at the Veterans Affairs Hospital.

The younger Robert, who graduated from Vestavia Hills High School, planned on becoming a doctor when he attended the University of Virginia. But his father’s bout with cancer in Robert’s junior year changed the son’s plans.

“He moved his office down the hall to the chemo room and had his colleagues treat him,” Robert says. “I spent a lot of time at the hospital that year. I really wasn’t enthused. It really turned me off, your workplace being a hospital.”

Paco Robert with his parents, Maria and Dr. Francisco “Paco” Robert Sr., at Birmingham’s first Dinner Lab dinner.

So Robert told his parents he wasn’t going to medical school and that he instead wanted to become a chef. “They were very skeptical,” Robert says.

Once Robert showed he was serious, graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., and working in celebrated restaurants, his parents realized he had made a good decision.
Robert wound up in New Orleans to pursue an MBA at Tulane University. He likes what he has seen of Birmingham’s evolution since he moved away after high school in 1998.

“Every time I go, something new is popping up. I used to think it was the most incredibly boring place in the world,” Robert says.

Now, the Barons play at Regions Field in the city center, craft-beer breweries dot the cityscape and former chefs from Frank Stitt’s acclaimed Highlands Bar and Grill are opening their own places, he says.

“Now it’s cool to live in downtown. When I was there you didn’t even go into downtown,” Robert says. “That was another piece, a driving factor, for us to go there. Birmingham’s got its magic back.”

Robert hopes the Dinner Lab experiment adds to the magic, not just in Birmingham, but in 32 other cities – with more on the way. Visit Dinner Lab for more information.

*All photos courtesy of Cathrine Taylor