I’m not a foodie, decidedly not. Fancy restaurants tend to stress me out. I prefer casual and comfortable dining. Not fast food, but good food. In London, my favourite restaurants were all diaspora spots: that Roti King in Euston where you sat alongside strangers on long tables and warm bowls of roti canai made you forget the cold and wet outside. The Iraqi and Syrian restaurants on Edgware Road where I’d often end up after long or bad days and be served cups of tea and steaming bowls of lentil soup that I never ordered.
In Beirut, I think back to an Armenian restaurant I went to after tough reporting days, where dessert just showed up on my table, unordered. In Colombo, it was a South Indian restaurant that was so busy that they sat me often alongside other solo strangers — men, always men, I was the only woman who sat and ate alone — all of us there for work, away from home, happy for a wholesome meal that felt like someone was taking care of us.
In my early months living in Dubai, it was a cafe where the staff knew my order, knew that I shivered if I sat under the AC, and could clock instantly if I was anxious and would joke with me until I laughed. It’s the same spirit I glimpsed in Iftars across the city during Ramadan, the same spirit at a friend’s monthly pot luck dinners, held at women’s homes across the city where we come together to talk, to think, and eat together.
If there are any lessons I’ve learned in recent months about how to cultivate community, they’ve come through recurring dinners where you start recognising faces over the months and years, where plates heaped with wholesome food and cups of hot tea would give way to laughter and a sense that there wasn’t any transaction here, but a habit being built.
In a city full of transplants, I often found myself surrounded by people who had been eating together, laughing together, and building new homes and lives alongside each other for many long years. They had watched each other fall in love, change careers, have children: they had become part of the fabric of each others’ worlds, one dinner at a time.
It’s not just about the food, of course, but the food is the excuse. The reason to come together regularly. There’s something about sharing, family style, that makes you feel like you’re in it together. It brings your shared humanity to the fore.
What if the dining table is part of the infrastructure for belonging?
I’m obsessed with questions about how we build belonging. The kind that unlocks possibility, builds thriving economies, is rooted in systems not just vibes.
And somehow, one of the models I keep returning to is the dinner table.
In early 2023, I interviewed Mandu Reid, who was then the leader of the Women’s Equality Party in the UK. It was one of those conversations that shifted how I thought about the world, and what was possible, entirely.
A piece of advice Mandu gave me: break bread with people. It’s one of the fastest ways to find common ground. If you’re struggling with a colleague, share a meal. If you’re stuck in a negotiation, have dinner.
There’s data behind this, too: a Stanford study found that in competitive negotiations, sharing meals made for more valuable deals. (Surprisingly, the same couldn’t be said for cooperative situations.)
“When you have a competitive negotiation, the added presence of food makes folks uncertain about how to behave. It’s that juxtaposition of that social ritual, which is cooperative, and the negotiation, which is competitive. That disconnect gets people to pay more attention to each other. They realize opportunities to create value that they wouldn’t otherwise,” Professor Margaret Neale, the researcher behind this study explained. “Food sharing is cooperative and communal in a way that sharing a calculator is not. Sharing a calculator is slightly cooperative, but it doesn’t have the same kind of social overlay. With whom do we share food? Our families, people in our social circle.”
My takeaway? When we eat together, we pay attention to each other, we orient a little more toward the communal.
In recent years, it’s felt like eating together has become the cool way to meet people. Kind of like version 2.0 of dating apps. Perhaps a response to our fatigue with social media, perhaps a response to a loneliness epidemic that’s been called a public health crisis, perhaps a natural way we all wanted to come together after a pandemic where we learned to be apart.
There are platforms that buy you a seat at a table with strangers, promising the potential of friendship. And over the last few years, supper clubs have re-emerged as the aesthetic way to come together, to hang out. I’ve been to a few: one raising money for a charity, one promised as a way to make friends, one at a chef’s home — a carefully cultivated and curated evening. Always more expensive than I would pay for a dinner out with friends, always an investment in the promise of the experience.
There’s an intimacy, of course, to sitting around a table with people. Luck of the draw who you end up next to. The best one I attended, hosted in a home for a small group, cultivated a feeling, as the evening stretched late, that we were part of a loud raucous family, where nobody was ready to leave even with babies to return to and early mornings beckoning on the other side of the night.
But there was no group text the morning after connecting us all. No promise of another family dinner. The moment was contained. The community held for a moment, and then dispersed.
What would it take for the communal table to become a mainstay? For us to start eating together, and keep eating together, to find common ground with each other?
The business model for belonging: the communal table
I’m a big believer in the idea that community, belonging, even friendship, aren’t things you can put a price tag on. Because they aren’t a guarantee. They are the side-effects of well-designed experiences: born out of shared identities or interests, of recurrence, of ritual, of time.
One meal cannot give you those things, one event cannot either. So instead, the business model depends on what people pay for: a ticket to an event, an experience for an evening, a good meal, maybe even access to each other.
I’ve found members’ clubs that host regular dinners; every variety of supper club that promises to introduce you to new people; neighbours in New York City walk-ups who cook together, one course each; someone who decided to host friends over every weekend for a year; a woman on TikTok who hosts what she calls “soup Sundays” that stretch into the early hours of Monday morning to fight away the Sunday scaries.
A 2026 OpenTable report on dining out trends in the US found that 78% of people said going out for a meal is a way to feel connected to others, with group dining seeing an 11% year-on-year increase.
These are all great — if anything, they’re a clear indication that we’re all hungry for the same thing — but I wonder if we could start looking at eating together as a bedrock for being together.
What would it take to redesign our restaurants so that you’re not just sat next to strangers on a long, communal table because that’s how the restaurant is set up, but because the point is to be part of a communal meal? What would it take, for example, for a cafe to host communal dinners one evening a week, the only catch — you can’t buy a single seat, you have to commit to ten through the year? Same week night, same group of people?
The most common models I’ve seen are: buy a ticket to a supper club, pay for the experience created by the host and the fancy food. Buy a seat at a table connecting strangers, pay for the potential of friendship.
So much of eating together is framed as friendship or as business lunches or networking happy hours, and I guess what I’m bristling against is that these are about our 1:1 relationships, not our relationship to the group itself.
But it feels like a lost opportunity: Is there a business model in recurring meals, shared around a table? In communal meals that begin to engender community? What if the communal table had a membership model — not exclusive, but inclusive.
What if a seat at the table wasn’t positioned as access in an elusive, aspirational way but instead as a way to become part of a routine. Like a gym class you show up to every Tuesday morning or the pottery class you go to Thursday evening?
In fact, what if after pilates or pottery, you ate with everyone else in your class? I’m not saying the people who share the same interests with us have to become our communities, but I wonder about the lowest-friction ways to keep people coming together, and what that might unlock in our lonely, polarised world.
What does it take for us to build a communal table, where you don’t need to know a gatekeeeper to buy an expensive invite? And what would change, tangibly, if this became a part of our calendar?
Roti King and all the cafes on the Edgware Road. Yes. The best value food I’ve ever eaten.