On scaling The Dinner Table Club and the art of bringing strangers together

Tyler runs The Dinner Table Club, a social dining community he started in his New York apartment in 2023 and has since scaled to five cities. He’s hosted over 200 events while building a model that brings strangers together for three-course family-style dinners. I spoke with him about the craft of hosting a dinner party and the work of scaling one.

Zelda: The Dinner Table Club started as a hobby. What did those early, low-pressure days let you figure out?

Tyler: When it started, there wasn’t the intention of it becoming a business. It was really for my roommates and I to meet people in New York. We had moved there a few years prior and had a good friend group already, but we wanted to build on that foundation and meet new people.

The low pressure in the early days is what allowed us to experiment. We had no background in hospitality. It was a labor of love in the sense that we were hosting these events in our apartment for our own purposes. One of the things we experimented with the most is venues. We started in our apartment. Then we moved to private venues across Manhattan, where we’d purchased all the assets (plates, utensils, everything!) to host dinners ourselves. And then we transitioned to restaurants.

We didn’t know what the experience was going to be at the beginning, and never thought about its financial viability. We started with the intent of building connections for ourselves, and then we saw there was a desire from many other people to have and seek community.

If we’d come in thinking it had to be a foundational business from day one, I don’t think it would have been as successful.

Walk me through what goes into organizing a Dinner Table event today.

We put a lot of thought into our brand and marketing. Our brand is very consistent and forward-leading, from social media to event listings and email communications, everything is clear up front about what The Dinner Table is. Why is that important? These are guests spending $80, $90, $100 for a ticket. It’s a hefty price, so it’s essential that they understand what they can expect from this experience. All our guests (we host 10 to 22 people per event) are generally coming alone. They’re taking time out of their evening after work. Everyone is arriving with the same intent: I’m here to meet new people. I want to converse. I want to share my experiences. When everyone at the table has the same intent, connection becomes easier to facilitate.

The other thing is our restaurant partnerships. We’re directly working with the restaurant, so it’s not a reservation for five or six people you can just book online. It’s a pre-negotiated per-person headcount, a pre-established menu, family-style service, seat rotations between courses, host facilitation... All coordinated directly with the restaurant. The restaurants are fully briefed on what to expect, so they can tailor their service to accommodate us.

And what happens during dinner?

The way we structure the event is around a three-course family-style dinner. Guests arrive and there’s a 30-minute mix and mingle beforehand. They get a glass of wine included with their ticket and start meeting the rest of the group. From there, everyone gets seated for dinner service, and the appetizer is served. After the appetizer course, guests switch seats, so they’re sitting with new people for the entree. They rotate again before dessert, which means across the three courses, everyone gets to sit next to different people each time.

Our host is the main point of contact throughout the evening. They welcome guests and introduce themselves, explain what the evening is for, and ease people in. From there, they facilitate the seat rotations and stay attuned to the energy at each table. We have conversation prompts on the tables as icebreakers, and our hosts are trained to engage with guests when they notice the energy dissipating or someone looking for stimulation.

You physically move to each new city for three to four months when you open a new market. It’s such a high commitment to your craft! What does that enable you to do?

Three things, really: I get to learn about the city’s subtleties, scout and train our hosts in person, and I get to build our restaurant partnerships.

On learning the city: we’ve only expanded to four markets so far, with San Francisco as the fifth, so it’s still early enough that I’d be premature to call myself an expert at expansion. The geographical nuances are real. When we expanded from New York to DC, our first tension point was: does this concept only work in New York, which is dense and transient and full of restaurants? The answer turned out to be no; but you only learn that by being there. By being on the ground, I can identify the neighborhoods with the right restaurant density and nightlife, and the subtle community differences between, say, Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, or DC and LA.

In hospitality, there are things you simply cannot plan for and that’s the hardest thing to teach. When we expand to a new city, I move there and run the first few events myself. Our hosts do two shadowing sessions with me. First, they shadow me: they watch the phrases I use, how I interact with guests and the restaurant, and how I facilitate seat rotations. Throughout, I’m narrating how I’m thinking about it. The second session is the role switch: they run the event, and I shadow them. The nuances uncover themselves during live events. We have documentation, but the live sessions are what actually work. About 50% of our hosts, by the way, are former guests who reached out on LinkedIn or Instagram, or came up to me in person and said, I want to be part of the team.

On restaurant partnerships: being the founder in the room adds credibility in the early months, when our brand presence in the new city is still limited. Once we’ve hosted six to twelve events in a market, restaurants start reaching out to us; the process becomes inbound. But in the beginning, I need to be the one in the room.

Let’s talk about tips for someone who would like to host their first dinner party.

My first advice is about your guest list. You don’t need people from the same profession or age bracket. What you need is to think carefully about whether these people will mesh. We all have friends who fit or don’t fit with certain groups; use that discretion to curate the right group.

Number two is the logistics. Managing the complexity of actually producing a dinner party is much more than it sounds on paper, especially if you’re cooking. Be really clear about the format. Are you cooking? Catering? Booking a restaurant? If you’re cooking, you could ask people to bring dishes. If you’re hosting at home, know how many plates and wine glasses you’ll need. Work backwards from the format. The more thought you put into preparing, the less overwhelmed you will be during the dinner, which will make for a more pleasant experience for your guests.

How do you help nervous or introverted guests get out of their shell?

I have a ton of empathy for shy people. Contrary to what people believe of me, I’d classify myself as an introvert, which is crazy when you lead a community-based organization. I know what it feels like to step into a room where you don’t know anyone, to dedicate three hours of a weekday evening to an event.

What makes The Dinner Table different is that everything is prepackaged. Food, drinks, tax, tip: all included. Even the restaurant selection is made for you. You know how planning a night out with friends usually goes: Well, where do we want to eat? I want Italian, I want the West Village... All of those variables have already been thought through.

From there, we have a host that facilitates the evening. That’s one of our biggest differentiators; many other supper clubs just put strangers at a table and let them figure it out. Our hosts check guests in, explain the evening, run the seat rotations between courses, and watch the energy. We have conversation prompts on the tables as icebreakers. If the host notices energy dissipating somewhere, they’re trained to engage and help.

These are things you can apply to your own dinner party, by stating clearly what guests should expect of the night, making sure as the host that you are fully present to introduce guests to each other instead of being busy in the kitchen, and even coming up with discussion themes.

How do you know a dinner party was successful?

For me, it happens right around the entree course. That’s when the initial hesitation has dissipated, people have some food and wine in them, and the conversation is flowing on its own. There are laughs. There’s noise. These are strangers who didn’t know each other an hour and a half ago.

You can feel it as a host. It’s palpable. That energy is my measure. That’s also what makes me want to keep going. A saying I have with my friends is that no matter what happens with The Dinner Table, I’m playing with house money. I’ve gotten to do extravagant events in Manhattan, expand to my hometown in DC, live in LA and Miami for months at a time. I get to sit in on an interview like this one. These are things I had no exposure to before. Being grateful for the experiences is what fuels me.