How do you monetize it?

The cost per plate is negotiated with the restaurant ahead of time. We collect all of the money at time of RSVP which includes our margin. We then pay the restaurant and keep our fee.

How do you deal with drinks?

As a customer I'd probably want to run a tab at the restaurant for whatever I drink (assuming they're alcohol-friendly) but as an organizer I'd probably want an upfront corkage fee I could take a reliable cut of.

Most meals include at least one alcoholic drink as well as soft drinks. Anything not included can be purchased a la carte and paid directly to the restaurant. A couple of dinners have been BYOB if the venue doesn't have a license and there's no fees for that.

Very cool! Any advice for someone who would want to replicate this endeavor?

Not the poster but I used to host potlucks on a semi-regular basis. No money involved but I imagine the skills are basically the same; inviting people, managing the incoming food, etc. I would probably start by hosting a potluck for 5-10 people and then scale up from there.

I'm happy to share my experience and lessons, but its a bit too much to type. If you are serious about starting one feel free to shot me an email (address in my profile).

What I will say is that I think the timing was right. My co-host and I lived in Manhattan pre-pandemic and regularly took advantage of the restaurant variety there. Our dinners are hosted on Long Island and our theory is that people who move from Manhattan to Long Island over the last 20 years started to expect higher quality food and a larger variety of ethnic options. Over the past decade or so the variety and quality of Long Island restaurants has greatly improved from what was here 25 years ago when I was growing up.

Post pandemic we saw an appetite (pun intended) for people to just get out of the house, be around other people, and have an experience. Quite a few people who come to the dinners say that they keep coming back because their partner/family aren't adventurous eaters so they never get to try new foods or typically wouldn't order some of the things we put on the menu. We aren't going for a fear factor vibe, but we do try to get people out of their comfort zone. We have a large number of solo guests who enjoy meeting new people and sharing a like-minded experience. Initially the group skewed heavily towards males in their 30's, which was our friends. Today its a very diverse group of people.

Very cool story! How did you grow the group? Was it all through word of mouth from your initial seed group of friends?

The first dinner was all 1st degree friends. Then it turned into friends of friends of friends. The 4th or 5th dinner was a big turning point. We had a minimum of 55 to hit for a popular restaurant we wanted and we were trending short (we actually would have ended up hitting it) and for the first time opened the dinner up to people who weren't directly connected. We posted an invite in a popular Long Island food Facebook group and after that we never had a problem selling out a dinner again. Last month Newsday wrote an article about us which added hundreds of Instagram followers and close to 100 new applications for membership. We sold out 48 seats for our April dinner in under and hour and ended up working with the restaurant to add a second night.

https://www.newsday.com/lifestyle/restaurants/dead-chefs-soc... (https://archive.is/w9Z1A)

> The food is served family style and is authentic to the region we are hosting.

Cool project, but about this: I highly doubt.

It's very hard to cook "authentic" food on foreign soil, everything from ingredients not being the same to boiling water being of a different kind just changes the taste immensely.

That depends on what your definition of authentic is. If it means ingredients sourced from their host countries, then that's going to make it extremely hard for any restaurant to start; considering the logistical cost and generally things not being fresh enough. The appropriate definition should be authentic methods. If I want to cook dum biryani and market it as dum biryani, I should be cooking it in the traditional method of using a bread sealed handi; but calling it unauthentic if my chicken wasn't born in Hyderabad makes no sense.

That attitude isn’t invited to the dinner party.

I guess it's the kind of "pretend to do something exotic and new" party while eating stuff grown or raised in Georgia with spices coming from Turkey.

I “think” I understand what you’re trying to get at. But it’s an unfortunate and limited perspective. Sure, New York isnt Thailand and the restaurant didn’t source their ingredients from a Bangkok market at 4am that morning. But that doesn’t mean the chef didn’t cook, study, or live in the region previously. So does that mean the only thing that makes a dish authentic is its local ingredients and there’s no credit given for the chefs experience? Also, how do you know the chef didn’t import any of the ingredients or spices from the place you’re expecting for it to be authentic?

You are coming from what I assume a Western perspective. You should talk to the restaurant owner about authenticity. They will likely have the same opinion as the person you're lecturing. Meat or veggie ingredients if imported from a different continent, will often be frozen and not fresh. The water obviously is not imported and that affects the taste directly. The meat will have a different smell if sourced locally, etc.

While I disagree with the above poster's attitude, I agree with the point about food tasting different depending on where you are.

Perhaps you can get relatively authentic Indian food (ignoring the variations in Indian cuisine for a second) in the U.S. and Canada, compared to India (I've traveled India for comparison). Because there are tons of import markets in both countries to get all the same ingredients.

But Indian food in Greece definitely has a Greek flavour to it, because it's quite hard to find the proper ingredients to make more authentic Indian food. They used feta instead of paneer!

I encountered this with "Mexican" food in Germany, which—anecdotally speaking, uniformly tasted of Maggi-brand chicken bouillon.

This is often intentional as it's a way of bridging a foreign cuisine to the local palate - which feta certainly would do. I don't personally like it but I think that's why it sometimes happens. It's not very difficult to make paneer so anyone that is serious about replicating proper Indian flavors could do it.

> But it’s an unfortunate and limited perspective.

Well, if something that is not prepared with authentic ingredients is authentic to you we have divergent opinions.

You're right, how dare these rubes not ship in gallons of water from Turkey so they can boil that to be truly authentic. What idiots.

If you know anything about cooking, water affects the taste of food. The water in Turkey vs America taste very different. Therefore it is very difficult for restaurants to achieve the same "authentic" taste in foreign countries.

Edit: dishes authentic to a region cooked as close to authentic as the chef and ingredients allow.

It's strange how you are being downvoted when my foreign friends say the exact same thing. They say that the food at the restaurants we go to have a different smell from the food back home.

Maybe when your friends travel, they change too.

The other possibility- that the climate and soil are different- is too absurd?

“You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish you had at a later time.”

Your friends say "the Chinese food in America doesn't taste the same as the food back at home"?

Or your friend interrupts a restaurant owner - a restaurant they've never eaten at - and says "you call that 'authentic' food? I doubt it."

One of the best things about meeting people in person is that no one is rude enough to make this kind of comment to your face. Unfortunately the internet removes that barrier.

Your comment is confusing rudeness with your ignorance of how foreigners feel about food in their host countries vs at home. His comment is not any different than what my Indian and Chinese friends say.

No, you are missing the point. Saying the OP’s comment, as stated, is just rude and socially inappropriate. In person, it would come off as being standoffish, nitpicky, and hostile. It’s not a good way to make friends and influence people.

This doesn’t exist online, where it’s acceptable to post “drive by” snarky putdowns that add nothing to the conversation and don’t actually address the issue at hand - in this case, the difficulty of sourcing ingredients.

A constructive comment would have asked about the difficulty of sourcing obscure ingredients and how the founder deals with that.

I am not missing the point. The person is giving an actual answer from his own lived experience and you are saying they are rude for it. I encourage you to expand your network of foreign friends so you can ask them about the food here vs at home. They will almost certainly say the exact same thing. The tase and the smell of the food here even if they make it will not have the same taste and smell back home.

I have a huge network of foreign friends and have lived abroad for the last decade.

Again; you are missing the point. It has nothing to do with whether the food is “authentic” or not, which is itself a highly debatable question. It has everything to do with the way you communicate to people when disagreeing with them or criticizing their ideas.

If you don’t care that people will immediately think you’re a pedantic, difficult person, as long as you get to be “right”, then sure, feel free to disregard what I wrote.

Have you asked them about the food here vs. back home? Will you return here when they tell you the food tastes different just like what the person said?

The guy said two sentences. You may think it's rude but it's probably the language barrier and he's just trying to give his honest perspective and there was no rudeness intended.

"The food tastes a little different" != "The food is entirely inauthentic"

Authenticity, in other words, is not an absolute. It's a spectrum, and you can get pretty darn close to the "authentic" end of said spectrum without needing to literally import foreign water.

It's a spectrum and OP offers to get closer to one end of the spectrum when it comes to authenticity. What's the fuss about?

I have lots of foreign coworkers and enjoy going to restaurants we find. No one sits there and complains about how this doesn’t taste exactly right so what’s the point in trying something new.

If you live in a metropolitan area, finding them in local niche shops tends to not be overly difficult. Not to mention that it's possible to import as well.

This is actually a really cool idea because for those of us who only dine out once or twice a month, it's nice to make it a unique or fun experience rather than a humdrum outing to eat average or templated food.

I would definitely be interested in something like this coming to our area.

Where do you host it? At the restaurant itself or at your own venue?

At the restaurant for the monthly meals. We are also experimenting with a "chefs table" with a smaller more intimate group hosted in pop up locations.

> For now is just a passion project that makes a few bucks, allows us meet interesting people, and provides the opportunity to discover new foods and restaurants.

What an unique side project, I'm very impressed.