“As I like to say,” booms emcee Josh Gates from the stage, “you’re at the most interesting dinner party in the world!” The gala attendees titter demurely at their tables in their tuxedos and gowns. Interesting? “If you say so,” they seem to agree, bashfully.
We’re on Manhattan’s West Side for the Explorer’s Club Annual Dinner gala, part fundraiser, part reunion for this social club of world travelers, scientists, and other expeditioners. A table costs more than I make in a year, but this dinner (if you can elbow your way in) is an opportunity to meet people who have been to the most remote parts of the world. If past menus are any indication, the food is at least as fascinating as the people: In the ’50s, attendees of this same dinner purportedly ate woolly mammoth (it was actually sea turtle); more recently the menu featured a glorious whole roasted ostrich; and at least once martinis were garnished with cow eyes.
These explorers have had the opportunity to taste, see, and feel the most rarified parts of the human experience. What drives them to a life of adventure, and what might they have learned from trekking vast arctic tundras or from gazing into the terrifying abyss of space? Founded in 1904 by Teddy Roosevelt, the club counts among its members legends like Buzz Aldrin, Carl Sagan, and Sir Edmund Hillary. Unsurprisingly, the Explorer’s Club lifestyle demands a fair bit of wealth. (Its members also include Jeff Bezos as well as everyone aboard the ill-fated Titan submersible that imploded underwater in 2023.) This weekend would mark the club’s 122nd annual dinner, and it was expected to raise a few million dollars that would be used to fund the club’s science and research grants and for operational support.
The festivities commence on Friday night at the club’s headquarters, an Upper East Side townhouse stuffed to the gills with stuffed exotic animals and other aging adventuring trophies from yesteryear.
Here, I wander, escaping the crowds to follow the dusty blue carpeting up staircases and through hallways with endless oaken doors. I peek into room after room—empty offices strewn with papers, an old, herbal-smelling library. I have the distinct feeling that I’m snooping, but no one has told me to get out, so I keep exploring. In the corner of one room, a mounted walrus head stares down dopily at me. Downstairs a stuffed polar bear, nine feet tall, rears back on its haunches.
There are wonders around every corner, but I’m most curious about the explorers themselves: mostly white men in cocktail attire, about half of whom have the stylish clothes and weird hair of the eccentrically rich, while another contingent sports unkempt beards and canvas shirts. Real explorers, I thought to myself.
I insinuate myself into a conversation with a member, who tells me the club is made up of three types of people. “The doers, the dreamers, and the financiers,” he explains: scientists and researchers (the doers), those who hold jobs to fund their adventures (the dreamers), and the financiers, well, you get it. When I ask him which category he’s in, he tells me somewhat reluctantly that he works in finance to pay for his exploration, which has mostly taken him around Central Asia.
Does he remember enjoying any particular foods? “Well, I’ve done fermented camel’s milk,” he says with a sigh, recalling an item he’d long since checked off a to-do list. Other members show me photos from the fantastical unofficial kickoff party in Yonkers the night prior. In one, a member lies on a bed of nails. Another shows a sprawling buffet featuring some unusual foodstuffs: cricket pimento cheese, braised bobcat, and brown stewed raccoon—the kind of snacks you might later reference in the final rounds of Never Have I Ever.
I excuse myself to get a drink. “First I was a CPA, then I became a lawyer, then I became an inventor,” I overhear one member tell another.
But the next night’s gala was the weekend’s real draw. A roiling sea of tuxedoed explorers mill around the room, bedecked in a wandering sculptural installation made to resemble thick green stems interspersed with bursts of blue taffeta that look like hydrangeas. Mark Bezos—Jeff’s brother—hovers around the bar. Woody Harrelson chitchats happily with a circle of onlookers. Servers circulate trays of carrot tartare, and, curiously, for such an interesting, monied crowd, pigs in blankets.
More hors d’oeuvres are stationed on two large tables on the far side of the room. The first, anchored by an ice sculpture, is flanked by freshly shucked oysters topped with buttery, orange uni on one side and a server doling out caviar bumps on the other. In their gowns and bowties, guests giddily slurp mounds of glinting caviar off the back of their hand.
The other table garners more of a crowd, as it features a cornucopia of less traditional gala fare: African blue tilapia, silk worm pupae served on a slice of cucumber, meal worms lain across each other in a delicate X, chubby grubs on a skewer, shiny cave cockroaches, two types of larvae, mopani worms, and, the grand finale, a spiny roast iguana. The crowd swarms the table, peering down at the adventure foods and excitedly asking each other what they’d tried and how it tasted. It isn’t long until the spread is picked clean.
“Interesting” is the refrain of the evening. Nearly everyone I speak with mentions that a major benefit of their membership is getting to know so many interesting people.
I chat with one such interesting person near the center of the room. “My claim to fame was I did the world’s first skydive over Mount Everest,” he tells me. “Why? Because you can. And because the mountain was there.” When I google his name later, I find his website, where he describes himself as “an astronaut, an adventurer and explorer, a philanthropist, entrepreneur, global financier, author and private island owner.” Equal parts dreamer and financier, it would seem.
Dinner is an uncharacteristically staid menu of artichoke salad and roast chicken breast, punctuated by speeches and awards. Among all the wealth in the room (and I did get the sense there was private-jet levels of wealth) were some truly admirable researchers, doing the kind of work you always vaguely hope someone is doing: researching snow leopards, say, or saving coral reefs, or perhaps spending months living among chimpanzees in Uganda to discover how they use plants with antibiotic properties to treat each others wounds.
I’m seated next to a German car executive who’d once taken a solo 50-day journey skiing through Antarctica. As the rest of the room bids on arctic cruises and excursions in Bahrain, I ask him if he got lonely during his nearly two months of total solitude in the frozen tundra. “No,” he tells me, curtly.
After dinner I wander around, asking other besuited strangers about their exploration, which they are all too happy to share. This one had made a career studying African warlords. That one builds rockets for SpaceX. This one once made Taiwanese beef soup in Antarctica. That one prosecuted war criminals for a living.
The conversational blur is a window into a very specific way of living a life. One that centers travel, but more specifically, that fleeting feeling called adventure. One where access is currency and a fetish for exclusivity is a given. “Yes, I’ve tried the fermented camel’s milk, have you ever eaten roast iguana? Why, of course. In fact, I used its spine as a toothpick.”
It’s the same drive for exclusivity that your problematically restaurant-obsessed friend is trying to satisfy—whoever gets to the latest hot spot first can plant their flag. “Have you been to Lei?” they ask wild-eyed. “Did you get into Dean’s? We were there for the soft opening—you must get the stargazy pie.”
Exclusivity is profitable. It’s been a huge driver in the wave of limited-seat omakase restaurants. The irresistible ephemerality of a series of single-bite courses, each one in front of you for just a moment, never to be enjoyed by anyone else ever again. It’s behind the rise of private members clubs and restaurants as well. But have you been to Zero Bond? I have. Despite the initial hype, it wasn’t that great.
And hadn’t I been taken in by the promise of exclusivity too? I’d made great pains to get myself into this dinner and the surrounding events, prodding my editors, nudging club spokespeople, anything for the chance to get into the hallowed halls of the Explorer’s Club to interview some interesting people.
Suffused with the glow of exclusivity, I begin to tire of it. The exotic bug buffet has been replaced by a few bog-standard coffee urns, and the crowd of tuxedos has started to thin. I know it’s time to go when the war crimes guy starts to tell me about his distaste for DEI—specifically affirmative action. “It’s about merit,” he tells me as we sipped our drinks surveying the slowly emptying party.
I leave the venue and walk around the corner, my tuxedo slowly dampening in the light rain, where I meet the car I’d called for to take me home. I clamber inside that clunky Toyota Sienna minivan, and watch the sliding door shut, no longer extraordinary, but extra ordinary.
