It began as a way to use up groceries. Six years later, the Sunday dinner in a third-floor walk-up has a waiting list, a rotating cast of cooks, and a rule that has never been broken: no one talks about what they do for a living until dessert.
The result is a room that behaves differently from almost every other room in the city. Introductions are made without agendas. Conversations start in the middle. People who would never be seated together at a benefit end up doing the dishes side by side.
Several collaborations have come out of it — a bookstore, a tutoring program, two marriages — but the hosts are careful not to claim credit. “We cook,” one of them says. “Everything else is other people’s doing.”
