How it Works

Each household agrees to be entirely responsible for one of the evening’s five or six courses – purchasing, prepping, cooking, plating, offering drink pairings, and, of course, cleaning. Each household takes it turn, with the result that no one is serving or being served the whole time and everyone has an opportunity, rather, is practically forced to, spend time conversing with the other guests. Often a specific theme or concept will be suggested as a guide for the meal as a whole, but always guests are encouraged to buy the best ingredients possible, pay attention to every detail of their dish and to take big risks as they conceive of and execute their course. This also means that the simplest, most basic dishes, the ones where the ingredients and not our egos are on display, will often be the very best ones.

Why it Works:
Because we have several courses, the portions will need to be small (just three or four bites), and so suddenly serving lobster or beef tenderloin to 10 people becomes much more affordable. That’s how all the fancy restaurants to do it. Why can’t we? We would much rather spend forty-bucks on an all evening-long, multi-course meal than we would eating processed, frozen, and fried items at Chili’s. Why spend 16 bucks on two gross drinks made mostly with sweet and sour and coke, when we could comfortably venture into the above-ten-bucks section in the wine aisle for the same price?

Moreover, because we want this to be an opportunity to try making things you might not otherwise justify making, this is perhaps the one place in the world where spectacular failures are genuinely and heartily welcomed. No one will go away hungry because there will be plenty of other food. No one will judge you if your dish completely flops. And about the only thing this meal can’t afford is a spirit of competition or the stress we might heap on ourselves to perform. If this sharing of the best of ourselves is to work at all - that is, if this is to be a place where it is genuinely good for us to linger - than failure has to be not only a possibility, but embraced as a gift too. It’s no fun cooking when your self-worth or reputation depends on it. It’s no fun eating food cooked that way either. So while we will certainly hope for success, we commit to celebrating the disasters as well.

A Few Details:
To avoid overlap or discontinuity, households are encouraged to announce the dish they plan to make as early as possible. Do your best, to plan a course that goes well with what is coming before it or might come after it. Sometimes this will work quite nicely, other times it won’t. But seeing how all these things and people come together is just part of the fun. (Usually this will take place on the Facebook page, but we're certainly open to exploring other options. Your suggestions are welcome.)

Guests are encouraged to share food allergies and dietary preferences, and cooks are encouraged to be hospitable in whatever way seems most appropriate.

Though for some of us much of the fun of an event like this is in trying new things, guests will not be expected to eat or drink anything they don’t want to. When appropriate, it may be good to inform the host ahead of time for planning purposes. But we certainly don’t want the specter of unfamiliar foods (or foods you know already you don’t like) to keep you from enjoying the evening. Our associations with food, positive or negative, are obviously quite powerful and often out of our control. An event like this can only really work if we can be genuine and honest about our complicated relationships with those things that nourish us. Again, pretending, just like pretension, has a way of undercutting the whole process.
Generally speaking, the host’s kitchen should be sufficient for most of the cooking and plating needs. Guests are encouraged to check with the host for serving options and to make sure the appropriate utensils will be available.

Guests are also encouraged to find babysitters for their children. We hope that the evening will be special enough to justify giving yourself the night off as a parent but understand that doing so is often difficult if not downright impossible. If we can assist by planning further ahead or by making the cost of childcare a part of the evening’s shared expense, please let us know. We're quite happy to contribute to anything that allows our friends to be just our friends for a few hours.

Because we want this to be an expansive experience, guests are invited to recommend others who might be interested in participating in this kind of event. Please send names and contact information to the host.
Our aim is to make this an event that occurs monthly with an ample rotation of participants (and possibly even homes willing to host). We hope that making this a regular occurrence will make coordinating various schedules less of an issue and, more importantly, will allow guests to freely decline an invitation until a later date when the timing works better for them. We will do our best to keep a running list of people who want to partake on a regular basis and will try to keep attendees in a regular rotation. Because the whole point is to share a common board, we will strive to usually have not much more than ten diners total.