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A dining club (UK) or eating club (US) is a social group, usually requiring membership (which may, or may not be available only to certain people), which meets for dinners and discussion on a regular basis. They may also often have guest speakers.
A dining club differs from a gentlemen's club in that it does not have permanent premises, often changing the location of its meetings and dinners.
Clubs may limit their membership to those who meet highly specific membership requirements. For example, the Coningsby Club requires members to have been a part of either OUCA or CUCA, the Conservative Associations at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge respectively.[ citation needed ] Others may require applicants to pass an interview, or simply pay a membership fee.
Early dining clubs include The Pitt Club, The Bullingdon Club, and The 16' Club.
In the United States, similar social clubs are called eating clubs. Eating clubs date to the late 19th and early 20th centuries and are intended to allow college students to enjoy meals and pleasant discourse. Some clubs are referred to as bicker clubs [1] because of the process of bickering over which applicants to accept as members. [2] Replaced largely by the modern fraternity and sorority system, eating clubs are now limited to a few colleges and universities, most prominently at Princeton University, though other universities including Stanford University, Davidson College, the University of Mount Olive, and Reed College have the presence of eating clubs.
Dining clubs often have reciprocity with other dining clubs across the nation or even worldwide. Some are able to arrange reciprocity with other private social clubs with more facilities besides dining such as overnight guest rooms and a gym. Examples of such social clubs include Penn Club of New York City, which has reciprocity with India House Club at 1 Hanover Square.
This list is incomplete.Date of founding in brackets.
Supper was originally a secondary lighter evening meal. The main meal of the day, called dinner, used to be served closer to what is known as lunchtime, around the middle of the day, but crept later over the centuries, mostly over the course of the 19th century. When dinner was still at the early time, eating a lighter supper in the evening was very common; it was not always the last meal of the day, as there might be a tea later. Reflecting the typical custom of 17th century elites, Louis XIV dined at noon, with a supper at 10 p.m. Even when dinner was in the early evening, supper was served at a ball, or after returning from it, and might be after other evening excursions. At an English ball in 1791, supper was served to 140 guests at 1:00 a.m. They would all have had dinner at home many hours earlier, before coming out. Other, grander, balls served supper even later, up to 3:30 a.m., at a London ball given in 1811 by the Duchess of Bedford.
Dinner usually refers to what is in many Western cultures the biggest and most formal meal of the day. Historically, the largest meal used to be eaten around midday, and called dinner. Especially among the elite, it gradually migrated to later in the day over the 16th to 19th centuries. The word has different meanings depending on culture, and may mean a meal of any size eaten at any time of day. In particular, it is still sometimes used for a meal at noon or in the early afternoon on special occasions, such as a Christmas dinner. In hot climates, the main meal is more likely to be eaten in the evening, after the temperature has fallen.
The mess is a designated area where military personnel socialize, eat and live. The term is also used to indicate the groups of military personnel who belong to separate messes, such as the officers' mess, the chief petty officer mess, and the enlisted mess. In some civilian societies this military usage has been extended to the eating arrangements of other disciplined services such as fire fighting and police forces.
A dining room is a room for consuming food. In modern times it is usually adjacent to the kitchen for convenience in serving, although in medieval times it was often on an entirely different floor level. Historically the dining room is furnished with a rather large dining table and several dining chairs; the most common shape is generally rectangular with two armed end chairs and an even number of un-armed side chairs along the long sides.
Colonial Club is one of the eleven current eating clubs of Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1891, it is the fifth oldest of the clubs. It is located on 40 Prospect Avenue.
A gentlemen's club is a private social club of a type originally set up by men from Britain's upper classes in the 18th and succeeding centuries.
A supper club is a traditional dining establishment that also functions as a social club. The term may describe different establishments depending on the region, but in general, supper clubs tend to present themselves as having a high-class image, even if the price is affordable to all. In the 2010s, a newer usage of the term supper club emerged, referring to underground restaurants.
Princeton Tower Club is one of the eleven eating clubs at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, United States, and one of seven clubs to choose its members through a selective process called bicker. Tower is located at 13 Prospect Avenue between the university-run Campus Club and the Cannon Club; it currently has a membership of approximately 215.
Tiger Inn is one of the eleven active eating clubs at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. Tiger Inn was founded in 1890 and is one of the "Big Four" eating clubs at Princeton, the four oldest and most prestigious on campus. Tiger Inn is the third oldest Princeton Eating Club. Its historic clubhouse is located at 48 Prospect Avenue, Princeton, New Jersey, near the Princeton University campus. Members of "T.I." also frequently refer to the club as "The Glorious Tiger Inn."
Princeton Terrace Club is one of eleven current eating clubs at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Terrace Club was founded in 1904 and is located at 62 Washington Road. It is the sole Princeton eating club located off Prospect Avenue.
The high table is a table for the use of fellows and their guests in large university dining halls in Anglo-Saxon cultures, where the students eat in the main space of the hall at the same time. They remain the norm at Oxford, Cambridge, Dublin and Durham universities, which are all organized into colleges. Other academic institutions also have high tables.
The Colony Club is a women-only private social club in New York City. Founded in 1903 by Florence Jaffray Harriman, wife of J. Borden Harriman, as the first social club established in New York City by and for women, it was modeled on similar gentlemen's clubs. Today, men are admitted as guests.
The University Cottage Club or simply Cottage Club is one of eleven current eating clubs at Princeton University, in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. It is one of the six bicker clubs, along with The Ivy Club, Tiger Inn, Cap and Gown Club, Cannon Club and Tower Club.
A state banquet is an official banquet hosted by the head of state in his or her official residence for another head of state, or sometimes head of government, and other guests. Usually as part of a state visit or diplomatic conference, it is held to celebrate diplomatic ties between the host and guest countries. Depending on time of the day, it may be referred to as a state dinner or state lunch. The size varies, but the numbers of diners may run into the hundreds.
Formal hall or formal meal is a meal held at some of the oldest universities in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland at which students usually dress in formal attire and often gowns to dine. These are held commonly in the colleges of Oxford, Cambridge and Durham, at Trinity College Dublin and Royal Holloway, University of London, in some halls and colleges of St Andrews, and the Australian sandstone universities, and at Trinity College, Toronto.
The Stanford Eating Clubs, also known as the Toyon [Hall] Eating Clubs, were founded in 1892, making them the oldest student-managed group on the Stanford University campus. Originally organized by students to provide much-needed meal services during the initial years of the University, they quickly became hubs for social activities. From their inception, the all-male eating clubs had become an alternative to the fraternity system, accepting students who were ineligible for membership in the fraternities for racial or religious reasons, e.g. Asians, Hispanics, and Jews. In the 2009-2010 academic year, after a history of 117 years, the University administration abolished the eating clubs. A new dining hall, "Linx," was established in their place, and Toyon residents were merged into the campus meal plan system.
The eating clubs at Princeton University are private institutions resembling both dining halls and social houses, where the majority of Princeton upperclassmen eat their meals. Each eating club occupies a large mansion on Prospect Avenue, one of the main roads that runs through the Princeton campus, with the exception of Terrace Club which is just around the corner on Washington Road. This area is known to students colloquially as "The Street". Princeton's eating clubs are the primary setting in F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1920 debut novel, This Side of Paradise, and the clubs appeared prominently in the 2004 novel The Rule of Four.
The social norm of reciprocity is the expectation that people will respond to each other in similar ways—responding to gifts and kindnesses from others with similar benevolence of their own, and responding to harmful, hurtful acts from others with either indifference or some form of retaliation. Such norms can be crude and mechanical, such as a literal reading of the eye-for-an-eye rule lex talionis, or they can be complex and sophisticated, such as a subtle understanding of how anonymous donations to an international organization can be a form of reciprocity for the receipt of very personal benefits, such as the love of a parent.
Sally Frank sued the three all-male eating clubs at Princeton University in 1978 for denying her on the basis of her gender. Over ten years later, in 1990 the eating clubs were defined as "public accommodation" and court ordered to become co-ed thanks to Sally Frank, her attorney Nadine Taub and the Women's Rights Litigation Clinic of Rutgers Law School. The eating clubs argued that they were completely private and separate from the university, giving them the right to sex discrimination. After many rounds in the courts, this argument eventually failed. The winning argument stated that the clubs were in fact not separate, and instead functioned as an arm of the university itself. This meant that the clubs were in the end covered by New Jersey's anti-discrimination law and forced to admit women.