Eating With Strangers

The world is taking “sharing is caring” very seriously. People share their houses through AirBnB, their cars via Uber and Lyft, and now, their meals using websites such as EatWith, MealSharing, and Kitchensurfing.

These websites allow potential guests to look through a list of hosts available in their city and select a cuisine they like based on meal descriptions and pictures. Diners also have to make a suggested donation to the host to cover the cost of the meal. On the other side of things, the hosts write a profile of themselves, what they intend to cook, and open up their house for guests to dine in.

The idea of meal sharing is promising. As a tourist, you get to experience what it’s like to dine at a local’s house. As a local, you get to try something new, make friends with other locals, and most importantly, avoid crappy take-out. As an aspiring chef, your culinary dreams can take flight when you host a group of guests.

But surely dining with or hosting complete strangers is daunting no matter how sociable you are. What happens if one guest gulps down wine by the bottle? Or if another diner pulls an Ariana Grande and licks all the food? Perhaps the potential gratification of eating with people who share a common love for food supersedes this fear. After all, they say, “people who love to eat are always the best people.”

This was also the reason why meal sharing websites were created. The mission statement from MealSharing’s website reads, “We want to make it possible for people, who otherwise would probably never meet, to get together and have a good time over food.”

It may seem like a supper club, with a common goal of creating new memories with other food enthusiasts, but there are differences. Supper clubs usually occur at a restaurant or an outdoor venue with an established chef helming the meal, however, meal sharing takes place in the intimate venue of someone’s home and the cook tends to be someone just excited about cooking. As a result, supper clubs can feed numbers ranging from 10 to 100 people, but meal sharing tends to keep to a cozy number of roughly two to 15 people.

Meal sharing has not taken off as well here in Austin as vehicle sharing and home sharing have. There are many websites available such as Cookapp, Feastly, and Kitchensurfing, but these are limited to major cities like New York and San Francisco.

In Austin, there are three websites that have hosts listed ­– EatWith, MealSharing, and VizEat. EatWith and MealSharing seem the most established here, with four listings each by hosts. A quick comparison shows that places like New York draw dozens of listings instead. (This could thus be a good arrangement to remember when travelling.) Furthermore, these websites offer locations beyond the U.S., EatWith has hosts in over 150 cities and MealSharing has hosts in over 450 cities.

My curiosity with this concept piqued just as my appetite roused. I signed up for my own meal sharing dinner here with host Manville Chan, a product manager by day and passionate cook by night. He offered a three-course Tuscan dinner with a pasta cooking demonstration.

I arrived at 7pm to his high-rise downtown Austin apartment and was greeted with a view that included a glimpse of Lady Bird Lake and the reflection of the sun setting on the Frost Bank building. The table was already set and Manville was preparing the chicken for our second course.

While I feared awkwardness, Manville and his friend Jeff looked comfortable with hosting. Manville started hosting on EatWith in early March and has hosted an average of 5 dinners per month. Prior to EatWith, he hosted many dinner parties as he enjoys cooking and entertaining people with his food.

Our first course was to be a pork and Tuscan kale ragu with homemade fettuccine pasta. Manville demonstrated the traditional Italian way of making pasta that he learned through his stints at culinary school in Italy. Although no specific cooking background is necessary to set up a profile on meal sharing websites, Manville shares that he had to create a video of his home, his cooking, and his food as part of his application, which also included an interview with an EatWith personnel.

The dinner guests for the night were an eclectic mix of Manville’s two cooking club friends who were also grandmothers, a young Norwegian woman who was visiting Austin for only a day, and myself. The Norwegian diner was looking for things to do with locals and chanced upon EatWith. It was a welcomed selection as she had mostly been eating out in her travels.

Dinner went off without a hitch. We started with a fresh from the oven focaccia bread served with a black truffle spread, and that eased our conversation to the dining table for the three courses. After serving each course with a wine pairing, Manville and Jeff would explain what ingredients were in there and how the wine was meant to match.

Meanwhile, the conversation flowed naturally, with the focus shifting from person to person as they shared their stories. I learned about their travels, their marital statuses, and what they thought of tattoos.

The comforts of the private dining room allowed us to be boisterous and comfortable, without having to restrain ourselves to any form of decorum. The only guideline was probably to treat the hosts and the place how we would like to be treated if we were the hosts.

I wondered if there were any odd encounters with hosting, but Manville says he hasn’t had any issues with guests before.

“The most unusual encounter would be hosting a birthday party for 13 people with two vegetarians and two gluten-free guests,” Manville shares, “It was a challenge coming up with a menu and substitute ingredients to fit everyone in the group.”

Sounds pretty mild compared to my imagined horror diners and stranger danger.

As the night drew to a close, laughter filled the room over our finished plates of coconut panna cotta and limoncello digestif. Goodbye hugs were given, contacts were exchanged – it felt like dining at home, albeit only temporarily.