This Bellevue supper club for seniors is the hottest ticket in town

The hottest club in Bellevue opens once a month with a limited guest list - just a dozen people leaving from a luxury retirement community called the Watermark.

This isn't like a Midwestern supper club, where friends and family meet up for relish trays, dinner and a show. The Supper Club in Bellevue is simply a club for people who enjoy eating together, launched in January by Roberta Watson, a Watermark resident since last year.

"It's a really nice chance to get to know people outside of here," said Watson, smiling in the back seat of a Watermark vehicle driving to the Supper Club's May meetup, "and dinner is always fun."

We rode together on that spring evening in a van filled with other residents, eager for dinner and conversation at Ristorante Tropea in Redmond.

As the group's leader, Watson makes reservations a month in advance, prepping each restaurant (they've also been to Cafe Veloce, Matt's Rotisserie & Oyster Lounge, Flat Iron Grill, Sparrow and WildFin) on the essentials: namely, a large party needing separate checks. Arriving at Tropea, we were whisked into a private dining room, with 14 of us squeezed around one long table.

Before long, the entire group was singing along to Dean Martin's "Volare" as it played over the speakers. A round of drinks was delivered and enjoyed, and the volume of the jovial chatter increased as dinner decisions were made.

Watson's partner, Jim Oliver, raised his martini in a "cheers" that echoed throughout the room.

Though they live in the same building, the Supper Club folks can't get enough of each other.

So why is this dinner club a hit in a living facility stocked with plenty of the usual "cruise ship" amenities? For one, the Watermark has 142 residents in its independent living tower, and some of the larger events thrown for the community can attract more than 50 people in one room.

Intimacy is what sets the Bellevue Supper Club apart.

"It's not an activity where there's an agenda," said Alyssa Vallesteros, Watermark's senior living operations leader. "It is solely an opportunity to gather around the table and genuinely get to know each other without the outside noise."

If you build it …

Watson and Oliver moved into the Watermark last August. They had been living at another retirement community in Redmond since 2023, but decided they needed a change of scenery.

There was a supper club at Fairwinds, their previous home, but when Watson and Oliver settled into their new life at the Watermark, they found only a few social clubs: bingo, other games, a happy hour group, as well as different committees to potentially join.

After Oliver mentioned to Watson that she should start a supper club, she was off to the races. Watson talked with Bella Mancini, lead community life associate at the Watermark, about her desire to start the club and got her full support.

"We get a lot more people that want to go when it's resident-led," Mancini said, noting that it's "self-promoting and it's already been vetted." And, she added: "It's like a cruise ship. You can come and go as you please; the beauty is choice."

For Watson, starting the club was personal: "Food is a key part of my life."

Born in 1950, Watson grew up on an apple orchard in Cashmere, Chelan County. She had a grandfather who raised chickens, delivering eggs to her family every week, and a grandmother from the South on the other side of her family who taught her how to cook.

"Every Sunday was dinner at my grandma's, whether you wanted to go or not," she said. "Food was the constant connector."

Watson and her ex-husband took over the family orchard in the 1980s, raising their two sons on the farm. They had 15 full-time employees working 60 acres of orchards, with Watson doing the cooking and running things.

After Watson and her husband divorced, they sold the orchard, and Watson moved to the Seattle area, where she founded and ran a catering company that served a specific clientele: those with food allergies.

Even in retirement, Watson said she utilizes the kitchen in her apartment daily. That's no small feat when you consider that residents can head to one of the Watermark dining rooms for any meal of the day.

Those dining rooms are "beautiful," Watson said. But there's something about getting out of the building and into a restaurant, all together, that's "much more conducive to being yourself."

Around the table

Evenings on the Eastside with the Supper Club begin with Watson choosing a restaurant and sending out a sign-up sheet in advance. The lucky attendees, a dozen or so, meet in the lobby at the Watermark, all dressed to the nines as they chat quietly about the dinner ahead.

"By the time we get to the restaurant, they get really into visiting with each other," Watson said.

Conversations flow alongside martinis and glasses of wine. And while Watson has a few friends who are already regulars in the group - like Paul and Linda Hays, and Eva and Earl Shulman, whom she and Oliver met while touring the Watermark - there are often new people and new topics to discuss.

Dick and Marilyn Brody recently landed at the Watermark after selling their Mercer Island home; the Tropea dinner this past spring was the Brodys' first dinner with the club.

"I've never been one for group living, and I feel like this is taking some getting used to," Marilyn said.

That night at dinner, she and Watson quickly bonded over finding the perfect "quiet place" in the Watermark. (It's the Sky Club, for those not in the know.)

As platters of veal piccata, lamb chops and spicy lobster tail pasta were delivered to the table, the chat covered everything from summer plans and book recommendations to current events, with plenty of good-natured ribbing thrown in. There were many born-and-raised Seattleites at the table, with plenty of reminiscing about old classmates from Garfield and Franklin.

There is no age limit on gossip, of course, even with many attendees in their 80s.

Long after the bills had been paid that evening, when the complimentary Andes mints were a fading memory, the whole crowd laughed when one Supper Clubber grabbed another's glass of wine, polishing it off with a quip: "Otherwise we'll be here all night."

Yes, all these people live together in the same building. And yes, there are plenty of activities for them to do other than eat and chitchat.

Over and over, they're choosing to hang out at Supper Club.

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