A friend and I host a monthly dinner club for people interested in ethnic cuisine. We work with a single restaurant each month to create an 8-12 course all inclusive price fixe menu. The food is served family style and is authentic to the region we are hosting. We typically host the dinners on a Tues or Wed when the restaurants in our region aren’t too busy and could use the extra business.
Since 2023 we’ve been to 44 restaurants. In 2025 we served 1,099 guests and generated $126k in revenue.
This is so cool! As someone who loves trying out new restaurants I need to ask: why would I go with you guys instead of going to the restaurants myself with a friend or partner? Looking around your website it seems to me that there's very large attendance, which in my mind means generally less focus on the food itself. Do you think one of the main factors is meeting new people/the sense of community? Anyway good job! I'm not sure what your margins are but it's probably more than 500/month! Congrats!
I think there’s quite a few reasons people come. I’m just going to bullet some of them out in no particular order:
- We do the work to find the restaurant and curate a menu, story, and theme. E.g., we might go to an Indian restaurant and focus the event on only the southern regional dishes.
- Many times we have dishes that are off menu specially for our event.
- Sense of community. We have quite a few regulars who have gotten to know each other. In 2025, 45 people reached their 20th or 30th event with us. Since we take over the whole restaurant there’s a little more freedom in how the space is used. Lots of new friendships have been forged.
- When you go to a restaurant with a friend or small group, you can only order so much. We’ve had events with upwards of 25 different bites. There’s really no better way to sample everything the restaurant has to offer.
- There’s a few people who say their partner are picky eaters, so they come to our event each month to have the opportunity to be a bit more adventurous. It’s an incredibly diverse group with a lot of different reasons to attend.
Just to add my own observation here: some cuisines are really optimized for sharing in larger groups… certainly a lot of the regional Chinese cuisines assume many people at a table, with large (i.e. higher priced) servings. If it’s just 2 or 3 of you, you end up getting only 1 or 2 dishes, often with a lot left over.
So, this is a genius way of optimizing for that!
I totally want something like this here in Sydney.
Out of curiosity, if you don't mind sharing, what is the sort of profit you see on that 126,000 as i'm assuming alot of that goes to paying the restaurants?
Most of it goes to paying for the meal. We make around a 20% margin. Our cost to operate the business is quite low, but we do invest a lot of our personal time into it. It’s a labor of love.
Our biggest cost center is when we guarantee a minimum number of seats and come up a little short. Doesn’t happen often, but when it does it eats into the margin fast.
My partner and I divide and conquer. He focuses on front of house and I handle the backoffice.
The process starts ~3 months before the event. We start by picking a theme or region. Then contact some restaurants that fit the criteria and pitch them the event. That kicks off the back and forth on cost and menu.
Around 4 weeks before the event we send a save the date + previous event recap email. We summarize the last event and tease the next event, without giving away the actual resturant or type of food.
Over the next week we prep the invite email and payment forms. This requires putting the dishes on our menu template, research and writing about the history of the dishes, the region, and the resturant. Some of this content also goes onto our website.
Three weeks out we send the invite, which is a lottery system. Members have 5 days to request a seat and place a credit card hold. 5 days later we run the lottery (I wrote some basic software to randomize assignment, conver the card auth to capture and release any cards that didn't get assigned a ticket). Then we send an email to everyone who got in with which night they recieved and another email to anyone who was waitlisted. Everyone is added to a spreadsheet to track.
1 week before the event we send a reminder email and a last chance to cancel before the ticket is non refundable.
At the event we play host and check each guest in and say hi to everyone. Then we give a prepared ~5 min intro about the food, restaurant, celebrate any milestone members, and make any general house keeping accounments. Our 20 club members get a branded apron.
At the event we take video and pictures. Over the course of the next 4 weeks we post dish pictures with descriptions and history of the dish on our instagram. We also make a 1-2 min recap video of the event which also goes on our instagram and website.
Separate from the actual event related work we have to manage the books, handle members emails, and review membership requests. More recently we started selling shirts, so there's a little work in managing that as well.
Love the communal aspect. Curious about the economics of this, how do you typically split revenue with the restaurant, and what’s the average ticket price per guest?
We negotiate a per seat all in cost with the restaurant inclusive of food, one drink, tip, and tax. We sell the tickets directly to our members and add some margin on top. Average ticket is $115.
5 days before the event we lock the head count with the restaurant. At this point the ticket is non refundable (we allow transfers). Then we pay the restaurant one lump sum. At the event the guests are only responsible for their bar tab (outside the one included drink), we don’t get a cut of that.
Sometimes we have seat minimums we need to hit and eat the cost if we are short (that rarely happens). We don’t allow ordering any other food outside of what’s on our menu.
Wow! I've thought so long about doing the same thing in London. I wouldn't do it to make money persay, but to meet amazing people and connect folks. Would love to chat sometime.
We never intended to make money. The first dinner was with 13 of our friends. We just organized the location and menu.
From there people started to tell their friends, who told others, then the local newspaper wrote about us, and people started talking about us on Facebook food groups and posting on Instagram. The community grew very organically, we never spent a penny on marketing. Most of the original 13 don’t come anymore, and we have grown into an incredibly diverse community.
This is a great project! I'm thinking about doing something similar. Do you have any bad experiences, things you would have done different, or are thinking about improving now?
Honestly, I can’t think of anything I would have done differently. Each stage of our growth came with some challenges and lessons. I think we did a pretty good job of internalizing and adapting. We definitely made some mistakes along the way, but nothing I regret doing and wouldn’t do again. Every mistake and lesson taught us something.
Feel free to email me if you run into any challenges. We might have already been through it!
great to hear! I'm getting a bit worried about possible legal issues - although that is because I might not be involved in every meeting so I'm worried about possible risks.
I sent you an email, my email handler is alanmeira. If you are too busy and can't waste time on this there is no problem tho, your post was quite motivating already.
I’m a little behind on email, I’ll reply later today.
I’ll answer some of the legal right now. First, we are at every event. Not sure how much it matters legally, but we are there as hosts and to drive the feeling of community. Without us, I don’t think the community has the same feel.
We also have an unbelievably respectful and mature community. After over 70 seatings we’ve never had an incident. We also have a code of conduct document we send all new members.
Second, we setup an LLC to shield us personally from legal liability.
Third, not to say that it shields us, but the restaurants also have insurance and are a better target for a lawsuit.
We are in the US, and at the end of the day anyone can sue anyone for anything. It’s just the reality and risk of the times. It hasn’t been a problem for us yet.
- We are lucky to have a passionate community who tell others about us.
- Sometimes we do shared reels with the restaurant, which helps drive some of their traffic to our social pages and website.
- There’s a few large local Facebook food groups which have driven membership.
- The largest driver of new membership came from coverage in the region newspaper. We credit that with the transition from 1 or 2 degrees of separation to people we had no connection to.
- There’s been a few influencers who have shown up and documented their experience. We didn’t pay for it. It drove a few members, but the quality of the newspaper and Facebook group members was higher.
My interpretation was slightly different than yours. I read it as if they have no issue going to work and being paid to be a developer. However, they didn’t want to feel like they needed to constantly be leveling up and working towards the next rung on the ladder. Many companies have written or unwritten rules about leveling up or being pushed out and they screen for people hungry to grow. The author doesn’t seem interested in that trajectory.
I suppose in other industries this isn’t always expected. For example, you can easily be a mid-level accountant for your entire career without the company or industry expecting you to be on track to be their next CFO.
Maybe the author should be looking at medium/big non-tech companies that have been around a long time, have aging codebases, and aren’t innovating in the same way as as big tech or startup. I suspect they might find developers who have been there for many years and are pretty complacent.
I find the author's paragraph about small companies weird: other pages on their site indicate they are at a small 60 person professional services company. Their boss probably doesn't have a yacht. My boss doesn't at a large corporation, and I'm pretty sure his boss and his boss don't either.
Their resume indicates they have 1 year of experience. The unwritten rules about leveling up I think generally amount to reaching a first level "senior" (~5 YoE) where you can be expected to do things like figure out how to do a task and coordinate with others on your own instead of needing a mentor/lead to guide you all the time. Like it's more learning how to work with some technical stuff thrown in. I've been pretty direct with my managers throughout my 30s that I've got other priorities in life now (kids), and I'm not looking to grow and be more ambitious and all that, and I haven't found that to be an issue. Your manager is a person (for now. Good luck to gen alpha). They get it. Caveat: you still need to care, understand what you're doing at work, and do a good job. Don't phone it in, but you don't need to be chasing promotions either once you have some basic competence. I still get good performance reviews. We just have an understanding that I'm not looking at "the next step" or working toward any career goal.
Maybe the author's problem is that their workplace is basically a small body shop and isn't helping them grow? I don't know; never heard of them. They may want to find a more product development oriented company/team (so not just short term projects/contracts), perhaps like you say medium or large so there's more room for mentorship.
I see one of the projects was working on some thing used by a bunch of bike shops. That sounds like serving a direct need some small business had? One way to be both happier and better in your work is to understand why you're doing it. Why did a customer spend a not insignificant amount of money to have this thing developed? Why would someone spend their money to pay you to help them? Try to always have a good understanding of that wherever you are.
> My boss doesn't at a large corporation, and I'm pretty sure his boss and his boss don't either.
Don't have is pretty different from could not possibly afford though
Unless your company is extremely weird, I doubt that many layers of management could not afford a yacht if they wanted one
Then again, the bar for that is actually pretty low.
Source: My dad is a tool salesman, and also was the president of the local yacht club a couple of years ago. Actually thinking about it, that yacht club is surprisingly blue collar
I wouldn't ve surprised if white collar people hold off buying yachts unless they can also afford staff to pilot and manage them
There are tons of devs in same bracket, just not the most vocal ones. I could be described as one of them. In most corporations big enough, this is the only way to keep doing development instead of management, unless they have the grow-or-get-fired mentality.
As soon as I would step up one more level, I would be often responsible for team deliveries. Another step and team may not get bigger but various political pressures grow immensely, its much easier to get fired there, dealing with various types of sociopaths is semi-constant. While compensation not that much. And most work time would be spent on meetings and working in MS Office products, not that much development, hardly any creative work.
At the end its just an empty label that is up to you to consider for its worth, to join the rat race or not. Even with my lower position I've managed (rather successfully) teams when needed. I get cca same compensation as 2 levels above with less tenure at the company, way more than any peers and in highest paid region in Europe. I get 10 weeks of paid leave by company due to working on 90% contract. So what is there to strive for - much higher daily stress? Having after-work or weekend calls? Unpaid overtime/weekend work that come with higher positions, although required rarely? Work moving into boring endless calls and discussions, 0 creativity unless you consider churning out excel spreadsheet or powerpoints a creative endeavor? Hardly achievements, rather destructive failures.
No thank you, if I can make the choice. Quality of life, happiness and all that.
Same here. I tried to build a super simple iOS App in antigravity and I was out of quota before it finished. The whole thing was a couple of files and a few hundred lines of code.
In 2023 a friend and I started a monthly dinner club with the goal of eating around the world without getting on a plane. We gather once a month at a restaurant on Long Island for a meal focused on a theme or region of the world. The meals are around 10+ courses and include a drink. We work with the restaurant to craft a menu that is as close to authentic to the region as possible.
Our first dinner was with 13 friends and has since grown into a group of just about 1,000 members. Last year we generated around $140k for local restaurants on off nights (dinners are on Tues and Wed when business is slow).
Now we are working on evolving into more of a lifestyle brand for people who love food. I'm currently working on our clothing line and new site, which we quietly launched a few days ago (there's still a few odds and ends to finish): https://www.deadchefssociety.com. Would love any feedback!
That's such a great idea. Especially since you're also helping the restaurants out. Nowhere near that area otherwise I would've petitioned straight away
I use the main Claude code thread (I don’t know what to call it) for planning and then explicitly tell Claude to delegate certain standalone tasks out to subagents. The subagents don’t consume the main threads context window. Even just delegating testing, debugging, and building will save a ton context.
We work with a single restaurant each month to create a 10-20+ course all inclusive price fixe menu. The food is served family style and is authentic to the region we are hosting. We typically host the dinners on a Tues or Wed when the restaurants in our region aren’t too busy and could use the extra business.
Here’s the 2024 update (I haven’t run the year to date cumulative numbers yet):
I wonder how much of this had to do with the context window size? Gemini’s window is 5x larger than Cladue’s.
I’ve been using Claude for a side project for the past few weeks and I find that we really get into a groove planning or debugging something and then by the time we are ready to implement, we’ve run out of context window space. Despite my best efforts to write good /compact instructions, when it’s ready to roll again some of the nuance is lost and the implementation suffers.
I’m looking forward to testing if that’s solved by the larger Gemini context window.
I definitely think the bigger context window helps. The code quality quite visibly drops across all models I've used as the context fills up, well before the hard limit. The editor tooling also makes a difference—Claude Code pollutes its own context window with miscellaneous file accesses and tool calls as it tries to figure out what to do. Even if it's more manual effort to manage the files that are in-context with Aider, I find the results to be much more consistent when I'm able to micromanage the context.
Approaching the context window limit in Claude Code, having it start to make more and worse mistakes, then seeing it try to compact the context and keep going, is a major "if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging" situation.
I've found that I can quickly get a new AI session up to speed by adding critical context that it's missing. In my largest codebase it's usually a couple of critical functions.once they have the key context, they can do the rest. This of course doesn't work when you can't view their thinking process and interrupt it to supply them with the context that they are missing. Opacity doesn't work unless the agent does the right thing every time.
I thought I read that best practice was to start a new session every time you work on a new feature / task. That’s what I’ve been doing. I also often ask Claude to update my readme and claude.md with details about architecture or how something works.
As for /compact, if I’m nearing the end of my context window (around 15%) and are still in the middle of something, I’ll give /compact very specific details about how and what to compact. Let’s say we are debugging an error - I might write something along the lines of “This session is about to close and we will continue debugging in next session. We will be debugging this error message [error message…]. Outline everything we’ve tried that didn’t work, make suggestions about what to try next, and outline any architecture or files that will be critical for this work. Everything else from earlier on in this session can be ignored.” I’ve had decent success with that. More so on debugging than trying to hand off all the details of a feature that’s being implemented.
Reminder: you need context space for compact, so leave a little head room.
The best approach is never to get remotely close to the point where it auto-compacts. Type /clear often, and set up docs, macros etc to make it easy to built the context you need for new tasks quickly.
If you see that 20% remaining warning, something has gone badly wrong and results will probably not get better until you clear the context and start again.
Thanks, I hadn’t considered the plastic on the pepper grinder. Guess I’ll be looking for a new pepper grinder as I continue my pursuit of removing plastic and dangerous chemicals from the kitchen. So far the pans, tupperware, and cooking utensils have all been replaced.
While not food, another not so frequently talked about plastic exposure could be clothing dryer vents pushing materials from synthetic clothing into the air. It’s likely less of a problem than the rubber tires on our cars making their way into the air. But it was something that occurred to me while cleaning out the dryer vent this past weekend.
I’m definitely buying natural fiber clothing moving forward for this reason.
However, I wonder how bad eating bits of the plastic burr grinder actually is. Presumably, they mostly pass through. Stomach acid probably leaches a bunch of stuff, but is it worse than (say) canned tomatoes that were sitting in a plastic liner for a year? I’d wager the grinder bits have a lot of surface area from scarring. That’d increase leaching.
Anyway, I strongly recommend small turkish-style grinders:
(No idea if this brand is decent; the form factor is great, especially for $14)
It has roughly a single-recipe capacity, so I stick crushed red pepper flakes, cumin seed, celery seed, black pepper kernels, etc in it per the recipe, then grind until it is empty. The burr on the one I linked is metal.
I’d probably prefer stainless body + whatever is commonly used for espresso grinders, assuming such a gadget exists.
Your biggest exposure is going to be water, hands down. What you store it in, how you filter it, these are going to be major sources of plastics and pfas.
Agreed, already on it! I put Wedell Water filters on all of our shower heads and we have a filtration system for our kitchen sink water. I’d love to get a whole home water filter at some point.
Nothing says capitalism quite like a corporation polluting the entire planet with something they knew caused disease, actively gaslighted everyone involved, transferred liability to a sacrificial entity so they got zero punishment for it, and the rest of us are left to buy water filters for the rest of history if we want clean water.
3M and Dupont deserve the death penalty for it and should've been dissolved completely for crimes against humanity.
If only it would be so easy to blame it all on capitalism.
I've lived in communism and it was exactly the same. Pollution beyond any reasonable levels, testing chemistry on products and people, rules and regulations coming from government and faceless bureaucrats... The result was the same, but instead of corporate greed the reason was lack of any interest and foresight.
Well regulated capitalism is probably best equipped to deal with such. Whether ours is well equipped to deal with this is another question.
The problem occurs whenever there aren't competent and powerful institutions working to protect the interests of the people, so indeed.
But the thing is capitalism is a tremendously powerful machine, so it's really more dangerous than an unmotivated Polish bureaucrat. The Soviets may have drained the Aral sea but capitalism has poisoned the entire planet (with TEL even before PFAS).
Reverse osmosis is pretty much the gold standard for removing PFAS. You can get countertop units for a reasonable price. Look for the lab testing or certifications rather than random anecdotes since they appear to work fine to the end user.
As someone new to this how do the details work?
Do you need to buy a new membrane often like I imagine?
Do you have any issues with your water lacking minerals? (in the same way drinking distilled water is bad for you)
The model I have says to replace the filter once a year, and it's $170 AUD. I imagine you could probably get away with using it longer than the OEM recommendation though.
I had the same thought about demineralised water, you can get more expensive models which remineralise the water after, but it looks like it's not actually that important health wise because you get the absolute vast majority of your minerals through food, not water. And remineralisation is mostly for taste rather than health. Though I don't find the demineralised water tastes bad, but if you're used to drinking hard water it might be different.
Do you happen to know of any 10" water filter enclosures that are not made of plastic? I recently started looking for a two-stage one (meaning two enclosures connected in series) but haven't found one yet.
Same here. I am going to disassemble the cheap pepper grinders I recently bought to make sure there is no plastic in the grinding operation.
I switched to bamboo toothbrushes from plastic a while ago, before de-plasticizing was really a thing. Now I'm glad I did, because plastic bristles grinding against my teeth seems like an easy way for plastic to get inside my body. The bamboo toothbrushes are pretty nice too, the bristles are soft but firm, and the handle is made of bamboo too.
All disposable grinders are going to be plastic, and likely none of the refillable ones will be since the plastic burrs only last one usage before they are all chipped off in to your food.
and... plastic is not that hard, so the teeth should be able to grind down the plastic bristles as you brush your teeth. I'd find it hard to believe that no plastic is lost during brushing of teeth.
The idea of brushing my teeth with plastic has lost its appeal for me and will never be recovered.
That's addressed in their paper -they cover slightly different use cases.
- secure drop uses TOR. That's observable at a network level or via access to a users device. In many contexts being a TOR user is sufficient to out the leaker. Having a news app installed is less suspicious
- provides an easy way for a naive source to avoid exposing themselves on the initial contact. That's because their network traffic looks like every other user, and the app storage is deniable (takes up space even if not in use).
Coverdrop doesn't actually provide a way to send large files like secure drop. The paper suggests that the journalists would talk the source through how to safely use securedrop over coverdrop messaging.
So if you have enough opsec awareness and tech savvy to use securedrop safely it may be simpler to go straight there.
SecureDrop is great and we still will be using it at the Guardian for the foreseeable future. At the very least just to support sources who want to blow the whistle but don't use our app.
In terms of how it's different. We attain anonymity without requiring a user to install Tor Browser, which we think is significant. Building this feature into our news app lowers the barrier of entry for non-technical sources quite significantly, and we think helps them achieve good OPSEC basically by default.
CoverDrop (aka Secure Messaging) has a few limitations right now that we'll be working to overcome in the next few months. Primarily that we don't support document upload due to the fact that our protocol only sends a few KB per day. Right now a journalist has the option to pivot the user onto another platform e.g. Signal. This is already better since the journalist can assess the quality of, and risks posted to, the source before giving their Signal number.
The current plan to improve this within the CoverDrop system is to allow a journalist to assess the risk posted to a source and, if they deem it acceptable, send them a invite link to upload documents which the client will encrypt with their keys before sending. This affects anonymity of course so we'll be investigating ways in which we can do this while doing our best to keep the source anonymous. There are a few techniques we could use here, for example making the document drop look like an encrypted email attachment being sent to a GMail account. I like this[1] paper as an example of an approach we could take that is censorship resistant.
Another limitation is that the anonymity of our system is largely predicated on the large install base of our app. In the UK/US/AU we have a pretty large install base so the anonymity properties provided by the protocol are nice, but if another smaller news agency were to pick up our tech as it stands right now then they wouldn't have this property. That said, in practice just having our plausibly deniable storage approach is a pretty big improvement over other whistleblowing approaches (PGP, Tor based, etc), even if you're the only person in the set of possible sources using the app.
