RANDOLPH — On a Friday evening in late July, Amber Rapson stood at her stove, sautéing a small heap of garlic that filled the kitchen with a savory aroma.
In an adjacent room, her husband, Ben Rapson, dropped cubes of potato into a deep-fat fryer.
Over the next two hours, the Rapsons and their friends would complete 52 orders for a tapas-themed edition of Supper Picker-Upper Club, the semi-regular takeout business the pair run out of their home on Randolph Avenue.
With a 10-item menu ranging from spicy shrimp to albóndigas — meatballs cooked in a fragrant saffron and almond sauce — the tapas pickup was a big undertaking, and the couple was abuzz with anticipation.
“I couldn’t sleep last night because I was thinking about everything” that needed to get done, Amber Rapson said.
Seattle transplants with an appetite for international cuisine, the Rapsons launched Supper Picker-Upper Club six months ago to bring some variety to Randolph’s limited takeout options.
Every few weeks, the couple announces a new menu and pickup date — typically two Fridays a month from 5 to 7 p.m. — through their email list. Customers select what they want from a list of appetizers, entrees and desserts on the club’s website, along with their preferred pickup time.
Payments are made on the website — though a few senior customers have also dropped off checks — and pickups happen on the Rapsons’ porch.
The couple both have full-time jobs; Amber runs her own legal services business, and Ben works in social media marketing. But Supper Picker-Upper is where their passion for cooking can run wild.
Past menus have swung from Lebanese shawarma to Vietnamese noodles to pasta and meatballs.
“Amber is a very intuitive cook,” Ben Rapson, 42, said in an interview. Both husband and wife also draw on restaurant experience from their Seattle days.
The club has helped bring more diverse food options to the area, as some customers observed at the tapas-themed pickup on July 31, but it also acts as a social hub, with patrons catching up with each other as they grab their order.
“It does have this event kind of draw,” Amber Rapson said.
Running the club has also given the Rapsons an excuse to recreate dishes from their favorite takeout spots in Seattle, where they were college students and young professionals.
“We fed ourselves in college on these cheap, oversized meals you could get at these teriyaki places,” said Amber Rapson, who’s 39.
But when the couple relocated to Vermont — first Winooski in 2018, then Quechee and eventually Randolph in 2023 — those options slimmed.
While Randolph is home to the James Beard award-winning Thai restaurant Saap and the Chinese restaurant East Garden, there’s little else in the way of international cuisine, and most takeout spots are a 30-minute drive in any direction.
In an homage to the chicken teriyaki of their college days, last year the Rapsons started Flatlander Teriyaki, a food booth they set up at festivals such as the recent Queer Arts Festival in Barre, Vt. They also regularly deliver extra homemade baked goods to their neighbors, so organizing a supper club didn’t seem like a huge jump.
“It’s an amalgam of what we can do that’s real nice for people,” Ben Rapson said.
In March and April, the couple hosted a few test runs for friends and neighbors before opening up orders to the public.
Momentum built quickly from there.
The first official pickup, Mexican rice bowls with chocolate mousse and tres leche cake for dessert, garnered about 30 orders — an encouraging start.
Two weeks later, the couple received around 50 orders for their Indian-inspired menu of chana masala, chicken shahi korma, and lamb rogan josh, a curry cooked with ginger, fennel, and a herb called ratan jot.
“It’s all so different,” said Paulette Staats, a customer from Braintree, Vt., who picked up dinner on tapas night.
“There’s no takeout in Braintree,” which is a 10-minute drive from Randolph, Staats said. “These people are doing some really special work.”
While Staats enjoys the club for its changing menu, Allison Belisle, 59, appreciates the convenience.
“I hate cooking, especially in the summertime,” she said in an interview on the Rapsons’ porch.
She’d ordered one of everything off the tapas menu to stock her fridge for the week.
“It’s different because it’s home cooking with a flair,” she said.
As a line formed on the Rapsons’ porch at the July 31 pickup, the couple and their friends were busy readying orders inside. Amber Rapson packed containers full of meatballs and shrimp, while her husband managed the fryers and Bridgewater resident Kari Meutsch organized cold orders like the Basque cheesecake. In a corner of the kitchen, two other friends from Colchester, Vt., washed dishes.
Meutsch, co-owner of Yankee Bookshop in Woodstock, regularly helps out during pickups, which offer a welcomed respite from the responsibilities of running her own business.
“I like showing up and doing what I’m told,” she said.
Pickups might require all hands on deck, but the planning and prepping for each event begins weeks before an order makes it into a customer’s hands.
After testing dishes (including several gluten-free options) and nailing down the menu, the Rapsons begin the complicated process of calculating how to scale recipes to meet demand and building their shopping list.
The days leading up to the pickup are a blur of grocery store runs and food prep. The couple tries to make as much as they can ahead of time, but some dishes, like the spicy shrimp or the patatas bravas at the tapas night, have to be made to order.
After some trial and error, the Rapsons have calculated they can do 120 covers in their two-hour pickup window.
“I think we’ve dialed in the process,” Amber Rapson said.
The couple’s setup also has evolved to look more like a professional kitchen with each pickup.
At the July 31 event, metal shelving units held bulk bottles of olive oil, spices and cans of chickpeas, and next to the fryers was a prep fridge that the Rapsons acquired for free from Chef’s Market, the longtime Randolph grocer that closed earlier this year. Across from the fridge, a couple of metal tables for compiling orders were pushed together to form an L-shape in the direction of the porch.
Between buying ingredients and new equipment, the Rapsons don’t take much money home from the Supper Picker-Upper Club.
The tapas-themed pickup, for example, netted about $2,000. But turning a big profit from the business isn’t top of mind.
“I don’t need this to float my boat,” Amber Rapson said.
Looking ahead, the Rapsons have chosen a Mexican-Japanese fusion theme for the next pickup on Friday, Aug. 28.
This menu is particularly creative with dishes like a $14 Fajita Sushi Roll stuffed with steak, caramelized onions, bell peppers and cream cheese, and $18 Pork Pozole Ramen, noodles topped with pork, shredded cabbage, radish, hominy — corn kernels in an alkali solution — and a soy-marinated egg.
“Getting to play with the cuisine feels really nice,” Amber Rapson said.
As the menus continue to evolve, so too does the club’s calendar.
Come September, the couple hopes to hold pickups on Sundays or Mondays, for people looking for a convenient dinner option on nights when many restaurants in the Randolph area are closed.
That schedule would be similar to Carpenter and Main Restaurant in Norwich, which offers a $15 takeaway dinner every Sunday with a pickup window between noon and 4 p.m.
As more people lined up to receive their order on July 31, the pickup took on the atmosphere of a neighborhood get-together.
Many patrons knew the Rapsons from their involvement in town life — Ben serves on the board at Chandler Center for the Arts, for instance — and they leaned inside the house to say hello.
“Ben is a hard person not to know,” Randolph resident Paul Easton said.
He quickly turned to chat with another townsperson standing in line. It was about 6 p.m., and Spanish music playing from the Rapsons’ speaker mixed with the sound of customers chatting on the porch.
Randolph is very “community-oriented,” Easton said. “It’s a very cool small town.”
