Doors make better tables than doors. Sometimes.

Or maybe it’s that the table can be a door of some form; a door to new dishes and flavors and ingredients and the histories they hold; a door to conversations that deepen and enrich the relationships among those with whom you’re sharing the table; perhaps even a door to some dinner table version of yourself who is more interested, and thereby more interesting. 

In this case, the table was actually a door. The rest is just conjecture.

One year ago, I used the phrase Family Dinner in invitations to a meal that my roommate Dylan and I would be hosting at the house we rented in Albuquerque. I’m stretching the definition of invitation to include texts reading “ayo, are you free for a little family dinner thing this weekend?” My brother and I would be the only family in attendance, but every meal shared with various permutations of this guest list had felt deeply familial.

Julia, my brother Ben’s partner, moved back to New Mexico after the two had spent a year as teaching assistants in Spain, and Ben was in town visiting. Such was the excuse to gather friends around the dinner table, make a couple of pounds of pasta from scratch (with two different sauces), and eventually – spurred no doubt by the equation of wine + key instigators + key enablers – the photographic recreation of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper. 

There are 13 figures in Leonardo’s masterpiece, we were 14. Close enough. Long hair and a full beard meant I was cast as Jesus. Ben thought Judas’ finger-point gesture hilarious and cast himself thusly. No parallels in our relationship to read into there. I hope. 

Within our friend group, the house itself has a history. It is owned by our friend Mary, or by Mary’s folks, and has staged many of Mary’s own “family dinners” through the years. A Friendsgiving of note comes to mind; Ben and I showed up criminally late, though nobody seemed sober enough to hold it against us. I first got to know the house through Mary’s former roommate whom I dated for a few months as a sophomore in college. The minimal time I spent at the house while we were dating is a fair representation of the relationship’s eventual (inevitable) undoing. 

Somewhere in the years between that relationship ending and COVID starting, Ben enlisted a group of friends to conspire in creating a fake pop-up restaurant in the backyard. It was supposedly a project for his photography class, though his final deliverable was a not-so-short short film. Regardless, Ben, myself, and eight friends created a one-off dining experience called The Topiary in that yard for four couples who, at least according to their exit interviews which we filmed (my role throughout was videographer), seemed to enjoy the experience well enough. For the ten of us who brought it to life – and I hope the others won’t mind me speaking for them here – it remains one of the most hilarious, remarkable, and inspiring things we’ve ever done as friends and individuals. Dewey, one of the contributing friends tasked as Chef alongside Mary, would probably add stressful to that list of adjectives.

Post-COVID, Mary offered to rent the house to Ben and I. Her offer was timely, we’d been trying to move out of the duplex that had seen me through my last years of undergrad. We refer back to it somewhat fondly as the “hallway house.” 

We took Mary up on her offer, of course. After eighteen months together in that house, Ben joined Julia in moving to Madrid for the year. Our friend Dylan moved in to fill Ben’s room and rental obligations. When I moved out a year ago, our friend Marco took my place. And so Mary’s house, which had become Ben and Josh’s house, which was then Josh and Dylan’s house, is now Dylan and Marco’s house. We all still call it Mary’s house though, and it has been the setting of many fantastic Family Dinners through the years. 

That night of the Last Supper recreation saw our largest audience for a dinner in a while, and somewhere along the way a fold-out table usually used to accommodate larger gatherings had been loaned out and not returned. Short on space, Julia and Ben fetched one of the spare doors from the garage and propped it up on a few extra stools alongside the tables we did have. Spare doors are a common feature in the places I’ve rented. I find some doors get in the way of feng shui. Do kitchens, closets, or bathrooms really need doors? Bathrooms, perhaps. 

The tables and door were covered in tablecloth, or maybe those were bed sheets. The assembly crew opted to leave the golden doorknob exposed for purposes of aesthetic intrigue. 

If not for the door-table or the friends and family gathered around it, I felt then as I so often feel around a dinner table: ‍

‍This table could be anywhere, the meal of any cuisine, the people sharing it of any background or acquaintance; the simple act of coming together around food is humanity’s oldest and most enduring recipe for connection. For me, it is also one of the most powerful.

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A long table lives on the low-ceilinged first floor of a former barn converted into an Albergue along the Camino Primitivo. Fourteen of us laughed in four languages the night I sat at that table.

A table for four, positioned up against the wall where ambiance echoes the loudest, exists under a permanent shroud of tablecloth in Guerriero's, a family-run Napolitano restaurant in Morristown, NJ. Our mother’s parents were different people to Ben and me around that table, versions of themselves we’d never have known if not for the mozzarella coroza, or the spaghetti and meatballs, or the old Nonno himself who’d come sauntering out from the kitchen to swap stories with our grandparents.

At the corner of 8:30 and Fetish, diagonally across from the daytime dance camp The Pink Mammoth, Chef Sizzle of the aforementioned camp – a mammoth of a man with a heart so kind dogs must see him as one of their own – serves up steaks on paper plates atop our blue fold-out camping table. He brought them especially for me, knowing my birthday always fell on the week of Burning Man, and to this day my tenth birthday dinner rivals any I’ve had since. The last time I saw Sizzle was 11 years ago. I think of the day we might share steaks again often. 

Outside the village of Manang in Nepal’s Annapurna Valley, a splintered board of wood is propped atop stacks of rock beside a large fire pit, a cauldron of soup simmering above it. A large ladle and bowls are retrieved from the ruins of a nearby home. Around the fire and make-shift table gather locals, sherpas, and foreign tourists on the Annapurna Circuit or Basecamp trek. Putting bowls to mouths, exhaling visible breath caught like smoke in moonlight, we commiserated and communed across culture and language, navigating the despair brought by nature’s devastation, fighting off the fatigue for the sake of one another's company under the stars. 

Across three continents and over countless meals, the core of my worldview was carved around three different tables that moved in turn with our family from Cape Town to Morris Plains to Hursley to Winchester to Randolph to Randolph again and at last (for now) to Nashville. Each night Dad would return from work, often exhausted, and we’d share a meal. He’d ask my brother, mother, and I about our days and we’d ask him and Mom about anything and everything. Sometimes we’d get stories about their youths in South Africa, about the year they spent as exchange students in Missouri at 18, or the years when it was just the two of them. When Ben or I had done something good, it was celebrated, and small good deeds became true triumphs. When one of us had done something wrong, the action and situation were matters for us all to learn from, and while I remember those dinner conversations as long, arduous, stomach-in-knot affairs, the lessons stuck. The lessons often came back to what my Saffer parents would call cool or not cool. Not James Dean cool but like “Hey, you stood up for your brother, that’s cool”. Not socks and sandals not cool but like “Hey, that’s a bully’s behavior, that’s not who you are, that’s not cool.”

Around those dinner tables Ben and I learned we’d be moving across the planet. We learned about history and our family’s place in it. We learned about morality and ethics and virtue, about food, ingredients, and cooking (though my parents and brother are likely to chuckle or roll their eyes remembering how they learned it was humanly possible to take three hours to eat a single baby carrot, courtesy of yours truly, but that's a story for another time). And by practicing every single night, we learned how, in conversation and in life, to be Interesting & Interested. 

That one’s a Dad-ism, or Nick-ism to all of y’all. “Doesn’t matter who, where, when, why or how,” he’d say, “if you’re talking with someone, you want to be interesting, but make sure you’re interested. Ask questions. Be curious. Learn about them and from them.”

I think the magic of a dinner table is that, whether or not they’ve been gifted the Interesting & Interested Nick-ism, people tend to show up that way when they sit down for a meal together. Friends, strangers, family, acquaintances, lovers; a silent meal is a crime to us all, so we lean in, we follow our curiosity, and from each question comes in answer a story, or a lesson, or even a friendship.

Perhaps I am lucky, and the majority of dinner tables I’ve shared are livelier than most, but I believe every table can be a sacred space if you make it so; where conversation weaves connection; where stories sow the seeds of inspiration; and where, as each sense is engaged by the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings of the evening, the bonds of our collective being are fortified. 

This newsletter may not achieve much, if any, of that. That’s okay. I’m just happy to have a unifying idea centered around food and community. I want to share inspiration, writing, art, ideas, and stories with whoever cares to listen, and I can’t think of a better idea around which to gather than a dinner table shared with friends and family. So pull up a chair, there’s plenty of space, and if we run out, I’m sure there’s a spare door hanging around here somewhere.