Outward
Published on December 12, 2023

Wednesday dinner club experiment – Hong Kong edition

written by ericaeyoung

This was my second Wednesday dinner club series after hosting the first series in London during the summer. The main differences between the two were that I hosted the London dinners by myself in my own home. In Hong Kong, I cohosted each dinner with a friend in a hired, private space with a kitchen. As a result, we asked people to help cover the cost of the dinners rather than asking them to bring food or drinks to contribute to the meal. Here are a few stats and reflections about this experiment now that it’s over. 

  • Sent out about 60 email invitations (just me, not including co-hosts)
  • Hosted over 35 unique diners over 4 dinners with an average of 11 people per meal (including me and 4 repeat guests)
  • No day-of cancellations (usually I’d have at least 1 per dinner)
  • 70% had never been to one of my dinners before (higher than London, but not as big a difference as you might expect)
  • Almost 40% of the guests had never met me before (much higher than London, by design)
  • Interestingly, the percentage of repeat guests in London and Hong Kong were the same, about 10%

Many of my qualitative reflections below are also based on comparisons between these dinners and the ones I hosted in London. You can read more about that first experiment here.

Experience

It was great to see that hosting in a private space that wasn’t my home didn’t seem to make a difference in terms of the experience. I also worried that asking people to share the cost of the space would change the dynamic, but if anything it made people more committed to coming. Co-hosting was great for expanding my network and I met a bunch of wonderful new people. It also had the added benefit of bringing my co-host and I closer as we coordinated and cooked together. In London, my weak ties were much more likely to participate than in Hong Kong. My guess is because it has been easier to keep those relationships warm over the years. In Hong Kong, people were more likely to self organise and create a WhatsApp group to share contact details. This might be because it was less obvious how they might reconnect in the future given the co-hosting setup.

Efficiency

In general, people in Hong Kong tend to be more short term in their planning, but also travel more. Regardless, it was still slightly easier to organise the dinners as a set rather than one by one. This way, if I met up with someone I could just invite them to an upcoming dinner that had space. Collecting money required a little more organisation, but not nearly as much work as I expected. It required much more planning to get all the groceries and transport them to the venue. If I only used ingredients typical of Chinese food, I probably could have avoided some of this. 

Costs

When all was set and done, the Hong Kong dinners might have been slightly more expensive. In London I didn’t ask for any financial contributions, but people were asked to bring wine and nibbles. In Hong Kong I bought those things, but asked people to contribute to cover the cost. The London dinners were less than HK$55/person for the food I prepared. Hong Kong ended up being about HK$70/person. It’s hilarious how much the cost of things varies from place to place within HK. I got polenta and almond flour for peanuts at Great in Admiralty, but they would have been really expensive at Citysuper. Depending on where I went, I could pay HK$10/200g of kale or more than 3x that. 

Recipes

Most of the recipes were the same as London, but I did use one new one. It was fine to serve hearty, room temperature salads in the summer in London. That set up would have felt out of place during a Hong Kong fall. Here is the curry I added to the mix, which was a big hit:

Also, if you’re interested in using the rental kitchen yourself, here’s the information. I’d be happy to introduce you to Calanthia, who seems to run it: https://www.rentakitchen.com.hk/

Happy to share more details if you have any questions. Look forward to doing this again when I’m back in Hong Kong!