My Mega HN Dinner Party (32 people, 7 courses)

http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/my-hn-dinner-party-3/

by shalmanese • 16 years ago

74 30 16 years ago

blog.bumblebeelabs.com

logicalmind• 16 years ago

Very impressive! I am a cooking-obsessed hacker too, but I haven't attempted something this ambitious.

hartror• 16 years ago

Me 3 it is nice to see we're not alone in our obsession cross overs :)

shalmanese7• 16 years ago

Give it a go :). Part of how I got to where I am today with cooking was to think of the most ridiculous challenge possible, pile on some additional ridiculousness and then go attempt it.

barnaby• 16 years ago

I can't say enough good things about this event. Great people, great food. Let's do it again! Or at the very least, let's all keep in touch and meet for a beer or coffee sometime soon.

shalmanese7• 16 years ago

Say thank you to Julia for me, she was an invaluable help in the kitchen!

tonystubblebine2• 16 years ago

Hang did a great job of cooking. The food really was astoundingly good and would have been impressive even if he was cooking for a smaller group in his own kitchen.

The company was nice too, so I don't think less ambitious cooks should be scared of hosting their own HN dinner party. It turns out that HN readers have a lot to talk about!

shalmanese7• 16 years ago

Thanks Tony,

I think you hit on the key point, it's not about the quality of the food, it's about making people happy. It's a great concept and I hereby license it under whatever open source license covers this sort of thing :).

tonystubblebine2• 16 years ago

But quality food is nice too! Thank you for being such a good cook. It's a little nerve wracking on our end too--if the food fails will people be rummaging through our kitchen? But once I tasted the lasagna filling I knew the meal was going to be a big success.

davidw2• 16 years ago

> even ridiculously expensive polenta is still dirt cheap

This is because polenta is "poor people food". My father in law looks at us badly if we give it to our daughter; I think because he grew up when there were plenty of people who ate too much polenta and not enough meat/veggies/other stuff.

Details aside, sounds like fun. I don't do lots of fancy courses like that, but once again, a nice "grigliata" awaits anyway who stops by Padova.

shalmanese7• 16 years ago

God bless the yuppie trend of glorifying the "authentic" peasant food of another culture as haute cuisine I guess :).

jrockway2• 16 years ago

God bless the old-money trend of eating terrible-tasting things because they're expensive?

Assigning labels to things that don't really need to be labeled is silly.

patio11• 16 years ago

Remind me to tell you about $50 Japanese tacos sometime. ("An authentic expression of the culinary diversity of the American Southwest.")

kbrower2• 16 years ago

You mentioned that you were still reading about food in your college dorm. What did you read?

Also I have made a few cooking/recipe tools http://cookthing.com, http://recipepuppy.com, http://foodguts.com. I would love to collaborate to make something new.

shalmanese7• 16 years ago

Email me at hang@bumblebeelabs.com and we'll see if we can figure something out.

3dFlatLander• 16 years ago

Glad to see I'm not the only one here who's interested in cooking--though I doubt I'm anywhere near as good as the OP. I started to teach myself how to cook a couple of years ago and it's turned into a great hobby that's also saved countless dollars from fast food. I've been thinking about compiling my notes into small website to help out others who may also be intimidated by cooking.

willwagner• 16 years ago

I've checked out recipepuppy.com before but not foodguts.com, which I think is terrific (although I'm not entirely enamored with the domain name as descriptive of the content) and will definitely use it in the future.

I could see that site having more social features and the ability to customize the content by moving and resizing boxes and having a my.foodguts.com with all your favorite content to quickly navigate the site. From a business perspective, recipepuppy.com might make more money but as a user, I can see using the content of foodguts.com more often.

kbrower2• 16 years ago

thanks for your feedback on foodguts. I really hadn't considered making personalized cooking pages but that sounds like a great idea. I was really unsure about the name, but other feedback has been mostly positive, and that's good enough for me.

maxklein• 16 years ago

What about some pictures of the event? And I think this dinner party idea is extremely brilliant as a way to get his name out there. If I had a company in the area I'd hire this dude immediately.

shalmanese7• 16 years ago

Noone took pics as far as I'm aware of. Sorry.

boredguy8• 16 years ago

All this food talk and no pictures...so sad. But what a cool thing you've done here.

matty• 16 years ago

I took a couple quick snaps before I left. Not the greatest quality since they were from my iPhone. They are at http://www.flickr.com/groups/hndinner/

llimllib• 16 years ago

there's nothing there?

JeffJenkins• 16 years ago

He's totally right about gauging responses. I've found the best question to ask people I've cooked for, especially if I'm going to continue cooking for them, is if they would eat this meal again. People seem to be much more forthcoming if I try to commit them to eating the meal again in the future.

shalmanese7• 16 years ago

Hrmm... That's a good tip. I've never tried that.

juliang• 16 years ago

Duck lasagne was my fave. Tx Hang!

ig1• 16 years ago

It'd be great to have one of these in London, there hasn't been a significant HN meet here since the SongKick organized ones a couple of years ago.

Although given the premium on space in London, finding someone who can host a large dinner party might be tricky. Still maybe booking out a floor at a restaurant might be a possibility if people are interested.

jrockway2• 16 years ago

I detect the start of a delicious new Internet meme! Nice to know that it's not just 4chan that starts them.

handelaar• 16 years ago

Seven courses of instant ramen, I hope.

mattmaroon• 16 years ago

Man I wish this was going on when I lived in the area.

My Mega HN Dinner Party (32 people, 7 courses)

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