Breaking Bread, Shattering Expectations
It’s a question you ask every night: What’s for dinner? Whether you are feasting solo, dining with a partner, or preparing a meal for the whole family, you crave a steady diet of diversity and excitement.
And you are not alone.
“There are very few places where you can go and actually connect with people,” explains PS Underground visionary Michael Fietsam. “You can go to a bar, you can go to a nightclub or whatever, but it's usually just your own little pod and group. And so, for us, this whole thing started as just a way to make people happy.”
For Fietsam, the path to an audience’s heart is through their stomachs. “The food that we offer for our events is unique and top quality.”
The secret ingredient is intrigue.
“When you go onto the PS Underground website,” narrates Fietsam, “that gives you some of the information about what you're going to experience at one of our dinners, but also there's some secrecy. You don't know how many people are attending. You have a hint of what to expect, but we don't reveal too much. A lot of our events are theme-oriented, so people will come in some costume or garb, depending on what the event is. And we never reveal our menus in advance, which is another unique thing about PS Underground. Most of our brunches, when we do brunches, are four or five courses, and our dinners can be up to seven to 10. We also follow the guidelines of the dietary restrictions of those around the tables. And so it's all kind of a little bit intrigue, but also a great deal of fun. That's what PS Underground is in a nutshell.”
Cooking UP the PS Underground Concept
“We started this nine years ago, and it was really just a group of friends around a table in a little rented bungalow,” he recounts. “Everyone just kind of chipped in enough money to cover the cost of the win,e and it quickly grew from there.”
In conjunction with his partner David Horgen, Fietsam sought to make meals into true events. “We had our own catering kitchen, and we started by doing pop-ups all over town in warehouses, art galleries, rooftops, gardens, and just anywhere we could find a place to put our table.”
Cuisine fuels PS Underground’s imagination, flourishing from the placemat to parts unknown. Each morsel is woven into a larger narrative, and Fietsam takes great pride in the stories he tells. “Our themes are very varied, anywhere from a wild and crazy bodacious bingo game, all the way up to one of our most avant-garde dinners called Light, which uses a lot of technology, projection mapping, and all different kinds of lighting and sound effects. And everything with that show is timed like a choreographed dance.”
Pausing for reflection, Fietsam adds, “We've done about 170 different themes.”
As it turns out, variety really is the spice of life.
Crafted Cocktails + Smell DJ
“All of our events include the full bar, so we create specialty cocktails. This is another way of enhancing the dinner. These specialty cocktails are created specifically to pair with the theme or even in some aspects pair with a particular course.”
Indeed, beverages help shape the PS Underground experience even before the food makes its debut. “Most of our events start with a cocktail or a little cocktail meet and greet reception before everybody sits at the table. This gives people an opportunity to get to know each other a little bit before they're sitting down for dinner.”
Once settled, guests are transported to a robust new reality via their sensory steering wheel. Dazzling illumination sets the stage, musical ingenuity floods the soundscape, and even the olfactory system guides the way to nourishment nirvana.
“We actually have what we call a smell DJ,” Fietsam whispers conspiratorially. “This is somebody that's actually in the corner of the room and through each course toasts different herbs and spices that match the food that happens to be in the dish that we might be serving. That is one of the elements as well. And certainly, all of our events are very tactile.”
Get Ready to be Wowed
That’s right: in addition to being mouthful, visitors are sure to be hands-on. “There's some sort of audience participation,” announces Fietsam. “For instance, in one of our shows, it'll be a real quiet moment in the dinner, and then all of a sudden, we'll have somebody come up and do a spotlight to sing some really grand iconic song, and we'll hand out candles to everybody, and they'll hold the candles in the air and sing along with whoever the performer might be.”
Regardless of the lineup, PS Underground invariably wows their audiences. “Some shows sell out very, very quickly. Some as quickly as 20 minutes,” Fietsam gushes. “All of our events sell out pretty well in advance.”
Even though PS Underground has reason to boast, Fietsam maintains an earnest humility. The term people person is an understatement when it comes to his passion and mission statement. “Our goal from the beginning was to meet new people and to do it in an environment where it's comfortable and safe, but we're also huge proponents of our community. This means that we do a lot of special events, fundraisers, and other things for different organizations throughout the desert. Everyone has been so supportive of what we do that we want to try and give back as much as possible. So whenever we can, we'll do a special price fundraiser or free event.”
PS Underground’s strategy pays off with smiles by the mile.
“We've heard of people that have made long-lasting friendships, business relationships, and things just from their interaction with each other at one of our tables.”
So, if you’re hungry for dessert fusion with a heaping side of inclusion, book a table at PS Underground while the tickets are piping hot!