CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Natalie Treviño started in the food industry in 2010, attending culinary school in Austin. After graduating, Treviño became a private chef, cooking for families in their homes.
When her grandmother was diagnosed with celiac disease, which meant she couldn’t eat gluten, Treviño started cooking for her.
“I would cook for her, and I would make sure that everything that she ever wanted, she could have, with celiac disease, I made everything from her favorites gluten-free,” Treviño said. “We would do dinner parties on Saturday nights, way too much food, and way too much wine, and have a great time, and I missed those dinner parties when she passed away.”
After her Oma’s passing, Treviño tried to get a job at various restaurants and had no such luck. Eventually, she had an idea to host a dinner party at Oma’s.
“I set up a really beautiful table in her backyard, I created an amazing menu, I emailed, Facebooked, texted like 80 people from my past and my present, and I was like, ‘can you guys just come to dinner just one time?’ They did, and when they came, I fed them way too much food, and they said, ‘don’t stop, this is so much fun,’” she said.
From there, Treviño created The Roughian Supper Club. The idea was to base a business around the dinner party. She creates the menu and posts it online for people to register to host or to pay to attend. When Treviño told her brother about her business idea, he said she had to do it.
“He said, ‘this is an amazing idea, and if you don’t do it right, someone else is going to do it instead,’” she said.
The Roughian Supper Club started in March 2019, and has been providing people in the Coastal Bend, and the state of Texas with good food and good memories at its events.
“There’s a team who is there to just serve, and you can sit back and relax and have a really great dinner,” Treviño said.
Week after week, Treviño gets welcomed into different houses, to cook in people’s kitchens for the dinner parties, and she says that is one of her favorite parts of the job.
“It’s completely humbling to be welcomed into people’s homes, to be trusted in their homes and in their spaces, it just means the world to me. It’s a part of the job that I never anticipated,” she said.
People interested in hosting a Roughian Supper Club dinner party can contact Treviño via email at Natalie@TheRoughian.com. To book a spot at a dinner party, events are added to The Roughian Supper Club website.
