Do you remember back when supper clubs were a thing? It was around the start of the last decade, and they were huge in places like London and Brighton before finally making it to Reading in something like 2011. The first one in Reading was called Friday Dinner Secrets and back in the day, long before I started writing this blog, I gave it a whirl. It was run by a very nice couple – he was British, she was Argentinian – in the very plush and fancy basement of their rather grand house off the Bath Road. You turned up with a bottle or two of wine and ended up round a table with complete strangers, united by very good food and, for the most part, excellent company.
Well, excellent company for me, anyway: I do sometimes wonder if it was quite as enjoyable for the poor unfortunates sitting near me and my ex-wife, especially if I was showing off and telling any of my most atrocious stories. Many years later, despite the recent advent of Timeleft, supper clubs still seem like a weird anomaly in the history of how people met via the internet and how people learned to juggle online personas and real world personalities – and like forums and message boards, they were swept away by social media. Why meet people in the flesh when you can talk to them from your living room without ever leaving your phone?
Anyway, Friday Dinner Secrets was good fun; I went a couple of times, and I enjoyed myself, but when the couple wound it up I remember thinking “that’s a shame” without being crestfallen. Many years later, when the blog was nearly five years old, I did something similar when I hosted my first ER readers’ lunch at Namaste Kitchen, on a cold Saturday in January. It felt odd to emerge from the cocoon of anonymity and meet about twenty people I’d only previously known as avatars, but it was surprisingly good fun; six years and nineteen lunches later, those events are still going strong and I’ve become enormously fond of many of the people who come to them, be they regulars or newcomers.
I’m always impressed by newcomers and especially newcomers who come along to a readers’ lunch on their tod, and I always try to make sure they sit with interesting, welcoming people. For many people, meeting strangers is their idea of hell (let alone eating in front of them) so it always feels like a vote of confidence when people decide to take a chance on coming to one of those events. And I was thinking about the whole concept of dining with strangers this week as I strolled up the Caversham Road, on my way to dinner at Vegivores with Paul, a man I’d never met.
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