Beats & Bobolo at Bridge 5 Mill: How Our 2026 Supper Club Brought the Party to Plant-Based Food
Supper clubs have become a much-loved annual event for Gwafuvegan. In July 2026, we decided to turn up the tempo and inject a bit more creativity into the proceedings.
A live DJ accompanied our flavourful menu that was packed full of organic ingredients grown and foraged right here in Manchester – all set inside a seriously cool venue that matches our ethos to a T.
Read on for how it all came together.
Setting the scene
We're always looking for spaces that reflect what Gwafuvegan stands for, and Bridge 5 Mill was about as close a match as we could hope for. The converted, solar-powered silk mill on the Ashton Canal in Ancoats is run as a sustainable centre for social change.
It’s home to charities, cooperatives and community groups all working towards a fairer, greener city. And it puts plant-based food right at the centre, rather than treating it as an afterthought.
Into that space we brought Tom Spence from Bitter Leaf Industries, spinning records as guests arrived and threading music through every course. Food and music have always gone hand in hand where Ngwafu grew up, and this was our first real attempt at bringing that feeling into the room.
The menu in brief
One of our big aims with this supper club was to bring Ngwafu's Cameroonian heritage to life through ingredients grown and foraged right here in Manchester:
First up was bobolo, served with a sharp, tangy sauce (pictured above). For those who don’t know, it’s fermented cassava, which is steamed in banana leaf – as covered in our recent blog post on swallows.
Next were cabbage parcels filled with rice and mushroom, topped with a fermented broad bean sauce and served alongside a seasonal salad.
Dessert was chin chin biscuits with cherry, alongside a Supermalt chocolate mousse.
As Ian Jones wrote for Creative Tourist, it was “all about satisfying snaps and dips and scoops."
And where it all came from!
Each of the dishes above was the product of months of quiet work. We grew, we foraged and we sourced from the best independent businesses Manchester has to offer.
The salad was dressed in vinegar made from elderflower we'd foraged last summer. The house miso folded through the cabbage parcels came from last year's pumpkin. Wild garlic was picked wherever we found it. Lettuce, radish, kohlrabi, mint, parsley, rocket, edible nasturtium, broad beans and cherries all came from our own allotment, grown from seed over the preceding months.
We also brought in:
Mushrooms from Fungall CIC, whose ethos sits close to our own ("we grow food, we grow skills, we grow communities")
Cabbages and carrots from our local greengrocer in Ashton
Beer brewed just down the road by Balance Brewing – read about the plantain beer we collaborated on for our 2025 event.
That patchwork of locally sourced ingredients was as much the point of the night as anything else. One of the quieter aims of the evening was to nudge people towards growing something themselves, however small that might be.
Watching guests taste flavours we’d grown and foraged ourselves made that point better than any amount of talking could. Food doesn't have to travel far to be exciting. And it doesn't have to be complicated. We hope a few people left inspired to get their hands in some soil.
The ethos behind our supper clubs
None of it would have meant much if it wasn't for everyone. We’ve used a tiered pricing structure for tickets since 2025, because we believe good plant-based food shouldn't be reserved for people who can afford the top price point.
Making the night as accessible as possible mattered to us just as much as the menu. It's part of the same conversation we're trying to have about sustainable eating being for everyone.
That conversation is really the whole reason we do this. We want to get people thinking about their food choices, even just a little differently. With the climate crisis only becoming more urgent, eating more sustainably and moving towards more plant-based meals is one of the most powerful changes we can make. And it’s a change best made together.
Thank you – and see you next year!
Vegan catering in Manchester might be our bread and (vegan) butter, but the supper club is a once-a-year showcase where we can go bigger. It’s a chance for us to put everything we've grown, foraged and learned over the previous twelve months onto one table. That's exactly what makes it special, and exactly why we're already looking forward to next year’s event!
Thank you to everyone who made it all possible, from Tom Spence to the team at Bridge 5 Mill who hosted us. Not to mention our own team of helpers and everyone who came along. See you in 2027.