Dining Clubs
A dining club is a social group, usually requiring membership (which may, or may not be available only to certain people), which meets for dinners and discussion on a regular basis. They may also often have guest speakers. Clubs may limit their membership to those who meet highly specific membership requirements, for example the Coningsby Club requires that one was a member of either OUCA or CUCA, the Conservative Associations at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge respectively. Others may require applicants to pass an interview, or simply pay a membership fee.
A dining club differs from a gentlemen's club in that it does not have permanent premises, often changing the location of its meetings and dinners. However, the members of both dining and gentlemen's clubs are often from the same social background.
In the United States, similar clubs that limit membership to students of a particular university are referred to as eating clubs. Replaced largely by the modern fraternity and sorority system in United States, eating clubs are now limited to a few colleges and universities, most notably Princeton University.
Read more about Dining Clubs: List of Dining Clubs, Fictional
Famous quotes containing the words dining and/or clubs:
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Of chairs turned upside down to sit like people
In other chairs, and something, come to look,
For every room a house has parlor, bedroom,
And dining room thrown pell-mell in the kitchen.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Neighboring farmers and visitors at White Sulphur drove out occasionally to watch ‘those funny Scotchmen’ with amused superiority; when one member imported clubs from Scotland, they were held for three weeks by customs officials who could not believe that any game could be played with ‘such elongated blackjacks or implements of murder.’”
—For the State of West Virginia, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)