<p>S2 and some of his facebook friends from his new college are talking about starting a supper club. Each week a different person would cook dinner for the group. They have a dorm rec room with a full kitchen that they can use. Has anyone here heard of something like that? Any suggestions for making it work?</p>
<p>Apparently, everyone thinks it's a good idea, and they have 70 people interested. That is obviously too unwieldy, so they are talking about breaking up into groups of 10.</p>
<p>Networking with Food!! Males only or coed?</p>
<p>We did that a lot when our kids were little, and our daughter has something like that in college. Not in a dorm, though -- everyone is in apartments. But there is a weekly dinner spread among four or five different apartments (10-12 people). Mainly women and gay men, but there may be a couple of straight men, too.</p>
<p>Tons of people do things like this, but it's usually amongst friends. </p>
<p>To make it work? Break it up into smaller groups, so maybe if there are five groups one group can do their dinners on Monday, another on Tuesday, etc. You probably can't cook for 70 in college kitchens. Maybe have one of the groups be vegetarian and one be reserved for only different types of ethnic food? Share what you're planning on making in advance so that people don't make the same thing. Decide on a sensible payment plan and enforce it. Don't allow guests to come to the meals, which will throw off the amount of food per person and could get out of control. People can maybe sign up for a group on the day/time it works best for them</p>
<p>Sounds yummy.</p>
<p>The number involved is clearly an issue, even cooking for 10 is a lot of work (preparation time - both shopping and actually preparing the food) and cost may become an issue for some. Weekly dinners may also be too ambitious and there are bound to be scheduling issues. </p>
<p>One thing I foresee is that they will see too many of the group backing out at the last minute because something better/more important came up - especially if they are not part of the team cooking. How depressing to think of one person going to all that trouble and then have nobody show up. </p>
<p>Perhaps monthly instead weekly, and with the cooking/shopping done in small teams of 2-3 rather than singly? Could be theme related too (holiday/ethnic etc).</p>
<p>I would let them try to work it out themselves. With 10 people, you can take a few not showing up, or a few extra, and it's no big deal. I imagine you have 2-3 people share the preparation for each meal. If it collapses, it collapses.</p>
<p>A number of my friends were in the same senior society in college, and this is what they did one night a week, sometimes with guests (e.g., me). It worked fine, and was fun for everyone.</p>
<p>We had a eating group in grad school. We ate Sun-Thurs. It consisted of the 4-8 people who lived in our house (depended on number of couples) plus about six other outside regulars. The way it worked was we had a different cook each night who was responsible for everything - that way you couldn't be a messy cook and make someone else clean up. People had to alert the cook in advance if they were going to be absent or if they wanted to bring guests. We kept a book that kept track of how many meals people ate (including their guests) and also how much cooks had spent on food. At the end of every month we did a reckoning figuring out the average price of a meal, how many meals each person needed to pay for, and how much they'd spent on food. The system worked very well - they are still at it as far as I know. I loved it - you were only responsible for cooking once every two weeks so most people made an effort to cook good meals. It was very cost effective. Our meals in the mid 80s averaged about $2.</p>