Never Eat Alone with Meetup.com
Regardless of whether you have any friends, whether you are new to town and don’t know a soul or whether you have such extreme dining preferences that nobody wants to dine with you, you never have to eat alone again. Thanks to Meetup.com people all around major cities are finding opportunities to dine out within fun groups.
Meetup.com was founded in 2002 with the goal of revitalizing local community within the United States. It is a website that enables people of varying interests and backgrounds to find like-minded individuals who would like to “meet up” and spend time sharing in their favorite activities. Many of the most popular Meetup.com groups revolve around food and beverages. It is easy to search by city and interest in order to find a suitable group.
Within the New York area there are Meetup groups focusing on dining out, tea, chocolate, vegetarian cuisine, raw foods, sushi, wine and cooking among other food oriented topics. Each Meetup.com group has an organizer and in the case of larger groups there are often assistant organizers as well. The organizers works to create fun events by carefully selecting restaurants, making arrangements for reservations and in some cases deciding upon prix fixed menus or requesting special selections. The success of each Meetup depends not only on the organizer’s skill for managing an event, but also by those who attend. The attendees of each Meetup vary from one event to the next, though often a core group continues to return again and again. True friendships are formed at these Meetups and soon enough the new acquaintances are finding time to dine amongst themselves outside of the Meetup events.
Recently I attended a few Meetup events around New York City and Westchester. Each was a fruitful experience of good food, drinks and conversation. I had the pleasure of attending a fantastic brunch at an old New York bakery, a dinner at an interesting Malaysian restaurant and a private Chinese tea event in a downtown loft. I left each of the events with connections that will no doubt evolve into long term friendships. At one dining out Meetup in lower Manhattan I met another great food lover named Eric, who maintains Pigging Out in NYC, a food blog detailing his adventures with dining around the big Apple. Eric is a great foodie who lives and works in New Jersey, I cannot imagine I would have met him were it not for our Meetup encounter. We became fast friends over conversations of travel and gourmet adventures. A message to anyone who has an interest that they would like to share among a group, Meetup.com is most certainly for you!
