Michael Chronister spent years as a professional musician before eventually finding himself back home in Fort Smith and, through a series of decisions that made considerably more sense in retrospect, in the restaurant business.

He started as a busboy.

He was wildly overdressed for the job, wearing a pair of shoes better suited for prom than hauling bus tubs, resetting deuces, and trying not to die in the weeds.

He stayed anyway.

Nearly two decades followed.

Michael worked his way through dining rooms, wine lists, cocktail programs, P&Ls, pre-shifts, post-shifts, impossible Saturdays, vendor meetings, menu changes, private dinners, regulars, walk-ins, 86'd specials, slammed kitchens, and all the strange little emergencies that constitute a career in restaurants.

Along the way, time at Arthur’s Prime under Jerry Barakat helped shape his understanding of what hospitality could be when it was taken seriously.

But Michael never went to culinary school.

He learned to cook from the other side of the pass.

For years, his job put him directly between the person making the food and the person eating it. He spent his nights talking with chefs about dishes before they ever hit the table: throwing around ideas, tasting sauces, arguing about ingredients, working through menus, thinking about wine and cocktails, and figuring out whether the thing they were building actually made sense as a whole.

Then he walked those dishes into the dining room and watched what happened.

He heard the compliments, the complaints, the questions, the silence after a particularly good first bite. He knew what came back scraped clean and what came back half-eaten. He heard what guests thought they wanted, what they actually wanted, and occasionally discovered those were two very different things.

Then he carried all of that back through the swinging door.

Night after night. Plate after plate. Menu after menu.

In a way, Michael learned to cook backwards.

He learned the reaction before he learned the technique. He understood what made a dish connect before he necessarily knew how to build it himself. Eventually curiosity did what curiosity tends to do: he started asking more questions, getting his hands dirty, cooking, screwing things up, trying again, and discovering that years spent on the other side of the pass had taught him considerably more than he realized.

The instincts were already there.

After years spent helping execute, shape, and steward other people's programs, Michael eventually started wondering what would happen if he built something of his own.

Not another restaurant.

Something looser than that.

A table. A room. A menu. A bottle or two. Some music. Interesting people who may or may not know one another yet. Permission to try something strange simply because it might be good.

Secret Spoon Society grew out of that question.

There are dinners. There are cocktails. There is wine. There are experiments that work beautifully and occasionally ideas that probably sounded better on paper.

That's part of it.

Because underneath all of it is still the same question:

What if?

What if dinner could be something more than dinner?

The menus, cocktails, wine, and music are the invitation.

The conversation is the destination.