From the Foodiverse: Nommery
The name Nommery comes from current slang for the joy of eating: Nom! Nom! Nom! The company provides a wonderful online format for exploring restaurants around the city, meeting new and interesting people, often with like minds, and sharing a good meal together. They’ve been doing this for more than three years now. Over that time I have done more than forty Nommery dinners, hosting most of them myself. I love seeing familiar faces again, and meeting folks for the first time.
Just like many online services, part of registering as a user for Nommery is creating your own profile. You can submit a photo, give people some info about your current work situation, state what you might be interested in talking about over dinner and tell a story about how you came to be where you are. The algorithm they have created helps to curate tables so that you would be joined by people that share the same passions.
As a Nommery host, I can choose the restaurant, date, and time for events. After posting the reservation on nommery.com, the seats quickly sell out and additional members join the waitlist. Once the evening arrives, you show up, take a seat and meet a diversity of people from all over the Bay Area who also signed up. Each person orders their dinner, plates are often shared, conversations ensue and more often than not a truly enjoyable dining experience is had by all. Often there are the added bonuses of doing business with folks (one woman hired me to do a Team Building Cooking Class for her team at work), or doing something social (another woman joined my Supper Club and it’s now going on a year that she’s been participating).
Everyone shares stories about their experiences in life. I love the vicarious travel I get to do when meeting someone from Lancashire or Sydney or Mumbai. I love finding out what people are into like creating mobile marketing campaigns for British customers, or supplying local fashion retailers with hard-to-find mannequins, or going on archeological digs in the wilds of Ireland.
If you live in the Bay Area, or come here to visit, please consider doing a Nommery dinner. At the very least you’ll be sitting at table with a group of food enthusiasts. That in itself is a good thing. But you may very well meet someone and strike up a life-long friendship.
