By Erik
· 3 min read
How to start a dinner club (and keep it going)
Everyone wants to eat together more often, but dinner clubs are surprisingly hard to keep alive. These seven agreements make yours something to look forward to.
We all know the plan. "We should really eat together more often." Everyone nods, someone starts a group chat, and three months later there's still no date. A dinner club sounds simple, but in practice it's surprisingly hard to keep going.
The good news: it's almost never the people. It's the setup. With a few clear agreements, your dinner club becomes something you look forward to instead of something you forget.
1. Start small
Four to six people is ideal. Big enough to stay lively when someone cancels, small enough to sit at one table and actually talk. With ten people it becomes a party — fun, but you never really get to know anyone.
2. Agree on a fixed rhythm
Scheduling kills more dinner clubs than anything else. Make it easy and pick a fixed moment: the first Thursday of every month, or every second Sunday. If you can't make it, you can't — the club goes ahead anyway.
A fixed rhythm removes the endless date polls and makes the dinner part of everyone's calendar.
3. Take turns cooking
Rotate the cooking. Whoever hosts makes the main course. The others bring something: a starter, dessert, a bottle of wine. That way nobody carries the whole load every time, and you get to know each other's cooking.
Tip: agree on a budget. Not everyone has the same room to splash out, and a dinner club shouldn't turn into a contest over who serves the most expensive cut of meat.
4. Split costs fairly
Money is awkward, but not talking about money is even more awkward. Pick one of these two approaches:
- Everyone hosts in turn and nobody pays anything. It evens out by itself.
- The host charges a fixed amount per person, for example the cost of the groceries. One payment request afterwards and you're done.
It doesn't matter which you choose, as long as you agree on it upfront.
5. Mind dietary needs
Vegetarian, gluten-free, no nuts: ask at the start and write it down somewhere everyone can find it. Nothing is sadder than a host who spent an afternoon cooking a dish half the table can't eat.
6. Make it about more than food
Food is the reason, not the goal. The best dinner clubs have something extra: a board game after dessert, a theme night (Italian, Indonesian, "everything from the oven"), or simply the rule that phones go in a basket. It gives the evening its own character.
7. Let new people in
Dinner clubs often fade because people move, have kids or just get busier. A fixed group shrinks on its own. So agree that someone can bring a guest now and then. New people bring new stories — and keep the club alive.
No group? No problem.
Maybe you're reading this thinking: great, but with whom? You've just moved, your friends live all over the country, or your social circle has simply become a bit smaller. That's completely normal — and exactly why BORDGENOTEN exists.
At BORDGENOTEN, hosts cook at home for a small group, and you pull up a chair. No fixed group, no scheduling. Pick a dinner, sign up, and eat with people from your neighbourhood. Love cooking? Then simply host your own table.
