This article is part of "Made to Order," a series highlighting the business strategies driving today's food industry.
On a recent night over spring rolls and mango salad, I spoke with more people than I had in months, from grandparents to young professionals.
That's the point: The Dinner Table is one of many businesses popping up to feed a growing appetite for a new kind of dining experience. It's the opposite of fast-casual — a slow, dinner-party-style meetup meant to turn strangers into friends — if only for a night.
Tyler Tep cofounded The Dinner Table in his apartment after living in New York for about three years. He wanted to find a way to contribute to the city's culture. What started with friends soon morphed into public, ticketed events at restaurants in New York, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, and, soon, Miami. Tep said they'd been flooded with inbound requests to expand to new cities.
"That tells me that there's untapped demand that we are not currently capitalizing on," Tep said. "And there's so much opportunity and need for these sort of social dining communities in different parts across the United States, which is great to see that there's an appetite for that."
At a time when flakiness reigns, friend circles are shrinking, and we're spending more time alone than ever before, dinner clubs have sprung up to fill the void left by our shrinking third spaces: shared places that are neither work nor home but a venue meant to give us an opportunity to be around others. Access to third spaces has narrowed over the past few decades as younger generations have grappled with their own social disconnection and loneliness; dinner clubs with strangers might just help scratch that itch.
But the food and beverage business is already tough, and the new ventures bring their own challenges. Starting something isn't cheap, especially in a space at the intersection of the events and restaurant industries, where profit margins tend to be thin. And some dinner club creators are paying their own way. Even so, they believe that dinner clubs can be a salve for a lonelier world. They're making it work by doing what they can — whether that means holding a second job, working the kitchen themselves, or keeping a menu as tight as possible to reduce waste.
"I've learned so much about what it means to run a business, to manage people, to work with sales and to partner with restaurants and just navigating the food and bev and restaurant industry itself," Tep said.
In any events business, there's always unpredictability and unforeseen challenges — spacing might be constrained, or restaurants might be filled to the brim with other diners. Even so, Tep said, "I look back on the experience, and while it is a lot of work, it's also really fulfilling to see that this is something that I've built myself — and it's really cool."
Busting loneliness and running an 'anti-restaurant'
Joy Watts, the executive chef of Dinner Party in Brooklyn's Clinton Hill neighborhood, describes her workplace as an "anti-restaurant restaurant." Instead of simply serving up dishes to guests, it functions as a nightly dinner party. It was founded in 2021, when Cami Jetta — a New Yorker who did not have restaurant experience but knew she had the chops to host a 20-person dinner party — began offering picnic-style meals and, later, dinner-party-style events with communal seating. Now the concept has moved to a larger, permanent space.
"A lot of people work from home these days. A lot of people just either go to the office and back," Watts said. "You have your tight, little bubbles that you operate in. And so to be able to go to a place where you pretty much could be guaranteed to meet someone who you don't know, or speak to someone who you've never met, is really special and hard to find."
Even though there's a demand for dinner parties, the concept has financial pressures, especially as part of the food and beverage industry, which has razor-thin margins.
Dinner Party has a two-week set menu, which has helped it keep down waste and costs compared with when it used to change its offerings weekly. Another challenge is a generous reservation period and cancellations. At a traditional restaurant, someone canceling might mean the loss of a patron who would've grabbed a glass of wine and a snack. At Dinner Party, a party cancellation might mean a $400 to $500 loss, Watts said, since the prix fixe menu costs about $64 to $80 a person, depending on the night.
"To fill those seats last minute, it's not like you're just asking someone to meet you out at the most-casual-ever dinner. It's a little bit more of something to be going to," Watts said. "So I think that those cancellations, paired with the fact that people don't really just spontaneously decide to come to Dinner Party day of, just makes seats harder to fill when we have last-minute changes."
When I visited Lucky Dinner Club, my fellow diners knew about these industry challenges all too well. Almost the entire kitchen staff of another upscale restaurant joined the table, enjoying bottles of wine, stacks of sourdough grilled cheese, and piles of honeyed focaccia.
We're here because of Gabrielle Macafee, a 29-year-old based in Brooklyn. Lucky Dinner Club started in her railroad apartment in early 2022 when she wanted to throw a dinner party for some friends after falling in love with cooking during the pandemic. Since then, she's hosted dinners all over the city at different restaurants, working the kitchen in venues big and small.
Macafee said that there are months when the income can sustain her, but amid the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, she also does creative work on the side. Like many small-business owners, she's starting with a passion project — it's just not possible right now for it to be a full-time job, she said.
"I think people just ultimately want to break that fourth wall, and they want to have a reason to break the fourth wall," she said, adding: "It's more of a safe space for people to be able to come and not have the societal pressure of performing."
When Macafee started out, she made Lucky Dinner "pay what you wish." But she said that meant she was "hemorrhaging money"; ultimately, she set a price of about $50 a person. During my visit, the meal was à la carte, meaning we paid for only what we eat.
"Now with rising food costs, I'm trying to keep it as accessible as possible because I want a certain type of person to be able to come," she said. "And that's usually a more creative person who's not in it for solely the Instagram content."
Solving the long-term finances of hosting dinner parties
The dinner party equation is hard to solve even for people with more restaurant experience, though the much-lauded Ambra in Philadelphia is working to crack the code. Its co-owner Chris D'Ambro said that prepandemic, the small restaurant had more traditional seating — five tables in a dining room, with multiple seatings a night.
When D'Ambro and the team re-signed their lease in the middle of 2020, they decided to rethink how the dining room was set up. They wanted a more fun experience for both workers and patrons. Now it's one seating a night, and restaurant patrons will often find themselves at a communal table that seats about eight to 12. D'Ambro said that at first, they anticipated whole parties would book the larger table. Instead, folks have been booking in smaller configurations; couples or groups of friends come in and sit with fellow diners who had the same idea. It's turned into a 3 ½-hour dinner party — a true experience.
"The tables inevitably end up talking about what restaurants they've been to in the city and all these things," he said. "It's fun to hear and facilitate these little groups, some of which have become friends and have come in together subsequently."
A group of 10 people met at Ambra and are still on a text chain a year later, D'Ambro said. And often, folks end up keeping the party going at his Southwark bar in the same building. That restaurant helps to cover the bills for the building, D'Ambro said; Ambra was never meant to be a stand-alone venue.
Even so, Ambra has been sold out almost every night, D'Ambro said.
"I think I was very nervous that people would be in there talking politics and religion, or somebody would be carrying the conversation too much and the table would be annoyed with the one person. But everybody's been cool and it's been good," he said. "The biggest surprise on a good level has been that I see these people wanting to carry on their evening and continue to hang out even after dinner."
Meanwhile, Tep is self-funding The Dinner Table, but he said the events had been profitable.
"I never saw The Dinner Table being what it is today, and I'm immensely proud of what it has become. And now what I do see is the potential of what it can be and how much interest there is in it," he said, adding: "I have the saying that 'I'm playing with house money,' in the sense that no matter what happens, what I've already done with The Dinner Table is amazing."
