Just a few of Chef Matteo's dishes.

It's no secret that underground dining is gaining momentum. Supper clubs, those (somewhat) secretive societies that host exclusive dinner parties (where guests are charged for their meals), have become increasingly popular over the past couple of years. Since the hosts don't have restaurant licenses, they tend to keep a low profile, but the actual dangers of hosting an illegal supper club are minimal. For the most part, health inspectors ignore them (though the hosts might run into some trouble if a guest suffered from food poisoning and reported the dinner club to the authorities).

So, these "underground" clubs are actually pretty accessible to anyone who has Internet access. They often have fancy Web sites advertising their services, and TV crews have been honing in on these semi-covert dining operations. Seattle's Gypsy dinner club was featured on the Travel Channel's Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, and rumor has it that Williamsburg's Whisk & Ladle might be getting its own Food Network Web series — which could officially launch these epicurean societies into the mainstream.

Another Brooklyn supper club, hosted by Chef Matteo Silverman for the past five years, offers under-the-radar meals to a special interest group: vegans. In a sense, his 4 Course Vegan Saturday night dinners take the exclusivity of a supper club to the next level. If you're a vegan, then your lifestyle will make you feel at home at this dinner club. If you're not, you may worry that — even after you pay $40 for four courses plus an amuse-bouche — your fellow diners may not welcome you into the fold. According to the supper club's website, it "aims to bridge communities through organic, gourmet, vegan fare, in hopes of facilitating increased mindfulness and compassion in and of the living."

It makes you wonder: Is this a straight-up supper club, or more of a vegan think tank? Do these dinners involve heated discussions on animal rights or slideshows of factory farms? Are non-vegan guests ridiculed if they don't succumb to conversion? There was only one way to find out.

As I buzzed Chef Matteo's loft, I wondered if I'd get thrown to the curb for wearing leather boots. But Matteo, wearing chef whites and a shy smile, greeted me warmly. The sparsely decorated space had high ceilings and stairs leading to the lofted bedrooms of the chef and his roommates. In the living room area, chairs hung from the rafters like swings and a tiny white dog barked furiously at new arrivals. The small kitchen was partially obscured by stacked plastic bins and shiny black dehydrators. Spices cluttered the shelves.

There was enough seating for over 20 people, but due to a few cancellations, there were only nine guests in attendance. My companion and I were seated with a young, blissed-out vegan couple, Matt and Jaime, and Sara, a no-nonsense vegetarian. At the next table, a middle-aged couple (one-part vegan, one-part along-for-the-ride) chatted up a pair of pretty young women who had attended several 4 Course Vegan meals before. One of them shrugged off a leather jacket to reveal an equally non-vegan purple silk shirt and said, "Oh, no, we're not vegans ourselves. We eat a little bit of everything." I was relieved.

Our first course was ravioli made from paper-thin slices of watermelon radish and filled with cashew "cheese." The radish is named for its bright pink color — not its flavor — and it was playfully paired with a piquant watermelon salad, spiked with jalapeno and lime juice. Now, I know that seeing the word "cheese" in quotation marks raises a red flag for a lot of people, but I have to say, the ravioli filling was surprisingly rich and tasty — not as dry and pasty as one might expect. Matt, the vegan at our table, explained that the texture of the ravioli came from dehydrating the radish slices. And his girlfriend, Jaime, gushed, "He bought me a dehydrator for my birthday last year — it's awesome!"

The next course was a thick pumpkin rasam (that is, an Indian soup), flavored with curry leaves and a swirl of surprisingly creamy lemon raita. Since yogurt is off-limits, the raita was made of a base of raw cashews and young coconut meat. The flavors were well-balanced, and as we scraped our bowls clean, Matt and Jaime announced that they're coming up on their one-year anniversary of joint-veganism. The claimed that giving up dairy led them to a culinary awakening. "We now eat a far more varied diet than we ever did before," Matt said. "We get really excited about finding new recipes, sampling new vegetables and visiting new restaurants…We discovered a whole culinary world that we never knew existed."

Matt and Jaime went vegan for health reasons (not animal rights reasons), after reading about the benefits of a plant-based diet in The China Study by T. Colin Campbell. Since Matt isn't trying to push his diet on anybody else, he gets bummed out when he reads negative comments about vegans in mainstream food publications and Web sites. But he believes that it's more than close-mindedness that makes omnivores attack. "I think food is a very personal thing that triggers very strong emotional responses," Matt said. "Vegans are choosing not to participate in a major part of several cultures and lifestyles. This will inherently cause some friction."

But this couple seemed to rise above their critics — veganism turned them into avid home cooks and experts on all the vegan-friendly restaurants in the city. In fact, Jaime said that she gained weight when they went vegan because she consumed so many nuts and so much coconut milk — two ingredients that you don't have to be animal-product-free to love. I was charmed by the passion of these friendly Born-Again Vegans (and thrilled that they weren't trying to convert me). However, I got the sense that our other tablemate, Sara was less than impressed by their dairy-free ways.

Sara stopped eating meat after meeting people who worked on poultry farms and in poultry processing factories. "I learned how inhumane their jobs are and how systemic that is across the meat industry," she said. "Being a farmworker isn't an ideal job either, from a health and safety point of view, but I couldn't stop eating altogether, so being a vegetarian is where I draw the line."

Since I didn't want to start an altercation over dinner, I contacted Sara afterwards to get her opinions on veganism. And it turns out that it just doesn't jive with her lifestyle. For one thing, she's a serious baker who once prepared a hazelnut marjolaine for a friend's 110-guest wedding, and then cooked up 300 chocolate, ginger, and apricot mini-cupcakes for another friend's big day. "None of it could have been done without eggs and butter, and vegan cakes wouldn't have been as delicious," Sara said.

Plus, going vegan would cramp her traveling style. In the last few years she has traveled to Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, France, Mexico, and India. "For me, food is very important, so it's an important way to experience a country," she said. "In all of those places it was easy to be a vegetarian so long as my rule was 'If I don't see meat I'll assume it's vegetarian.' But in most of those countries it would have been difficult to be a vegan…if you don't speak the local languages it can be difficult to find out if there is dairy in a product. And I can't imagine being in France and not eating pastries!"

As we dug into a samosa-like vegan pastry that is doused with coriander chuntey and filled with kalonji-spiced blue potato, Matt and Jaime recalled the week they went on a raw diet. Although it involved a lot of soaking and dehydrating in order to eat anything besides fresh fruits and vegetables, they were pretty into it. "At one point, we hadn't eaten in a couple of hours and we started to feel a buzz," Matt said, with wide-eyed excitement.

"It was kind of like being stoned," Jaime whispered across the table.

"Um, that's called a hypo-glycemic reaction!" Sara said, and I think she was probably right. I too would like to believe that eating healthy can elevate you to new levels of consciousness, but there's a fine line between getting high on salad and fainting from low blood-sugar.

The Born-Again Vegans looked at each other and giggled, and Matt admitted, "Well, I guess that's maybe what it was, but it was still pretty cool!"

After a few more courses — chile-and-ginger-spiced French lentil pave, served over a savory tapioca pilaf, and an underwhelming dessert of coconut cream in a too-tough tart shell — we were all stuffed. After feverishly cleaning up the kitchen, Matteo took off his white jacket and sat among his guests. Stroking his yippy lapdog, he mentioned that he's working on a line of vegan dog treats. This struck me as odd — aren't dogs natural carnivores?

But then, aren't we natural carnivores, too? I'm with Sara in avoiding factory-farmed meat, but I do buy chicken and fish from local purveyors. And I'd never say no to my Grandma's meatballs on Christmas Eve, even though I'm sure she doesn't buy her beef in the organic section. So, while I understand the health benefits of a primarily plant-based diet, I don't devote my life to abiding by dietary strictures.

But veganism is more than a diet — it's a lifestyle. It's an obsession. And it has the same allure of a supper club — it's counter-cultural, it's exclusive, and you have to work a little harder to get into it. For Matt and Jaime, it has been a healthy, horizon-expanding obsession. And the obsessive culinary experiments of vegan chefs like Matteo have resulted in some delicious food for the rest of us, and perhaps, for our little dogs, too.

Kara Zuaro is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and the author of I Like Food, Food Tastes Good: In the kitchen with your favorite bands.

Vegan menu items © Matteo Silverman, "The Scoop" photograph © Chris Gillard, "Plate" photograph from FoodCollection/Getty Images.