Clef Cooks 100 Dinners

Lessons and feels from hosting a weekly community celebration and dinner every Wednesday for one hundred weeks.

Every Wednesday for the last two years, the Clef team has hosted a community celebration in Oakland where we made dinner for anyone who showed up. Last night was the 100th week in a row (skipping Christmas and Thanksgiving) that we hosted Clef Cooks, and a lot of our friends turned up to mark the occasion. The weekly dinner has been absolutely critical to our mental health as founders, as it’s helped us build a support network of people who care about us and who we care about.

Clef Cooks started when we moved our company to Oakland. We didn’t have any friends and we were working too much, but we were in a co-working space with a kitchen. We thought that maybe if we made food, we would make some friends. So we put up some flyers around the office and made some lasagna on a Wednesday night(we had zero experience cooking for a crowd when we started, and lasagna seemed easy). That first night, we had about 15 people come to dinner, and the energy was so warm and excited that my cheeks were sore from smiling by the end of the night. It felt like magic.

At this point, we’re having dinner at 10 degrees of separation.

So we kept hosting dinners. And people kept coming, and they brought their friends. At this point, we’re having dinner at 10 degrees of separation. We’ve shared a table with pirates who parked their boat in the bay. We’ve shared it with politicians, including 2 Oakland mayors. We’ve shared it with firefighters and filmmakers and poets and developers and it has made the experience so much richer.

I have a personal rule that if you follow good people, they lead to more, and nothing has reinforced that idea more than this dinner.

Guests at Clef Cooks 100 left sweet messages for our team on a big white board — this is the whole team making silly faces in front of it :)

And those new friends have mattered, because starting this company has included some of the most intense and difficult moments of our lives. When things are hard, it’s easy to feel alone, and Clef Cooks has been an oasis in the middle of every week. When we succeed, we always know that we have a place to celebrate it. The friends we’ve made at dinner have held us up and supported us in so many ways.

Cooking a free, open invitation dinner every week helped us build a community, but it also helped us get to know the communities around us. We’re still pretty new to Oakland, but we’ve been able to get to know a lot of the people who are organizing and doing interesting things in the city. This is a city that was built on civic activism and tightly knit neighborhoods, and that history is important to understand and connect with if we want to build a company here.

Cooking a free, open invitation dinner every week helped us build a community, but it also helped us get to know the communities around us.

I have so much respect for the people fighting for this city, and there’s no way I would have gotten to know as many of them if we weren’t hosting an event like Clef Cooks.

B gives a toast at Clef Cooks 100

Last night was the culmination of all of the love and warmth that our friends have brought to the event over the last two years.

We made lasagna again as a nod to our first meal (and also because we had over 100 guests, so we needed something that was easy to make in bulk 😛) and also asked everyone to help feed such a big crowd by bringing salads, desserts, and drinks that they loved. The food everyone brought was all phenomenal, but one dessert stood out in particular.

Without the support we get from Clef Cooks, we absolutely would not have made it to where we are today.

Will Imholte (with help from his brother, Owen) made 100 unique, two-factor cupcakes. Every cupcake was different (they had toothpicks in them with numbers, and then a guide on the table to look them up with),and there were pipettes full of different kinds of alcohol to be injected into the center of the cupcake (the second factor). It was truly an incredible feat of baking.

Making dinner is really simple. Every week, we look up a recipe, order groceries (we usually spend ~$100 for a crowd of 20–30), and then show up to make some food. Somehow, though, the food we make has helped us create one of the most important successes of our company’s history. Without the support we get from Clef Cooks, we absolutely would not have made it to where we are today.

Thank you everyone who’s come to one of our dinners, and if you’re in the Bay Area and are interested in checking one out, hit me up on Twitter. I’d love to share some food with you 💙💙💙.