Cheddar is the brain child of me and Chiraag (my partner), born out of a shared interest in culinary exploration and how the curation of space impacts human connection. We take these weekly dinners as a regular opportunity to experiment with the levers of these two dimensions.
The core theme of Cheddar is fusion - the fusion of foods and of people. Each week, we invite 2 of our friends to bring a plus one (someone we haven’t met before, for a total of 4 guests) to connect over a menu of fusion cuisine. The hope is that our guests get to meet new friends and try innovative dishes, while we get to learn more about the cuisines we chose to explore, how we can create a more inviting space, and the people we have in our kitchen each week.
Our opening day for Cheddar was on March 9th 2025, and we’ve been running it consistently almost every week since then (9 iterations so far and counting!). As we’ve been running these, I’ve wanted to note down my thoughts, notes, and recipes for my own (and maybe your) entertainment and reference, so here it is!
Event Flow
Roughly speaking, this is the current format of Cheddar in its entirety:
Before
- Make a Partiful and send out invites to the primary guests a few days before the dinner (usually Sunday) to give them ample time to find their +1. Have the +1 RSVP as well
- Decide on the dishes and design the menu. There is no testing of recipes before the dinner. We go in blind with nothing but our ideas, cooking intuition, and the grace of God.
During
- As guests arrive, we ask them to wait in the hallway until the full party has arrived to be seated. We have all our previous menus and guests posted on the wall to peruse while waiting.
- After the guests are seated, we begin food service and casual introductions. We keep this portion of the night pretty free form and allow conversation to flow naturally.
- At the end, we ask to take a polaroid picture of the guests and have them sign an extra menu so we can post it on our wall.
After
- We ask guests to fill out a feedback form and optionally donate to our Venmo by posting QR codes on the back of our front door for guests to scan on their way out.
- We send a text blast a few days later thanking them for their visit, to remind them to fill out the form/donate, and send any pictures they’ve taken (we’re terrible at taking pictures during the event so mostly rely on guests for documentation)
Past Dinners
Ideation + Design
One our most asked questions is how we think of our menu ideas. It’s honestly mostly vibes but there is some systematic aspects to it.
Sometimes, Chiraag and I will have cuisine combinations that just come to us during week and will write down somewhere to reference when we need it. Often times it comes in the form of wanting to experiment more with one cuisine and thinking of how another cuisine might work well with it. When doing this, there are a couple things we consider:
- At least one of the cuisines should have a unique form factor. An easy way to combine cuisines is to present the flavors of one cuisine in the form factor of another. Examples are baklava french toast, teriyaki chicken tacos, or five spice french fries. For this to work though, the form factor must be easily identifiable. So it wouldn’t work as well to do just “soup” or a “rice bowl” without some element clearly anchoring it to a specific cuisine.
- When we want to combine flavors rather than cross form factor with flavor, we think about the role an ingredient plays in a dish. Knowing this allows us to swap out ingredients from other cuisines that play a similar role. Some examples of this is swapping tahini for peanut butter in the peanut dipping sauce for spring roles or red curry paste for tomato paste in ratatouille. It works especially well if the ingredients being swapped have been used for a similar dish, like using dashi and mirin for tortilla española to add the flavors of tamagoyaki.
- Another tactic we use is to combine cuisines with shared flavor profiles. Examples of this are how both Mediterranean and Vietnamese cuisine rely heavily on fresh herbs or how both Spanish and Japanese cuisines rely heavily on seafood.
It’s important to note that a lot of the ability to even come up with the ideas are grounded in a solid understanding of the cuisines we’re attempting to fuse - what are the characteristic flavor profiles, elements, and dishes that define this cuisine? Sometimes we don’t always have a good idea of this, so we’ll do research on the individual cuisines and see where we can draw connections. It’s led to a ton of learning about cuisines we were previously more unfamiliar with such as Middle Eastern or Caribbean.
Lastly, we do rely heavily on LLMs such as Claude or ChatGPT to help us with ideation. Sometimes the limiting factor is simply the sheer quantity of ideas to parse through or glean inspiration from, so it’s been really helpful to leverage the LLMs to just spitball some ideas or guide our research. Rarely do we take an idea straight from an LLM, we often will combine ideas or add our own elements, but sometimes we do.
As for designing the physical menus, I use Canva. It’s free and powerful and easy to use, so the process doesn’t usually take me more than an hour. Usually all I do is Google some images of “Vietnamese food menu” or “Mexican food menu” and try to incorporate the design elements of both cuisines I’m representing.
Cheddar Change Log
The structure of Cheddar today has gone through many improvements throughout the weeks, many with some level of intentionality behind it. Here are all the adjustments we’ve made, along with their rationale, in reverse chronological order:
- Menu descriptions
- Previously, we only listed the menu item title with no description because they were usually pretty self-explanatory. But as we’re getting more sophisticated with our fusions dishes and tapping into more niche cuisines, it’s been helpful to add a short description for the dish. We also try to add an “Origin Story” to the bottom of the menu to describe the inspiration for the menu as a whole.
- Candles
- We got this suggestion from some of our guests to just up the ambiance a bit. I feel like it’s been a nice addition :)
- +1s must RSVP + post-dinner text blast
- While people often wanted to give feedback or donate, sometimes they’d lose the QR codes. Sending a reminder with the QR codes has been helpful for engagement and the Partiful is a good single place to send pictures from the night as well.
- Polaroid picture + signed menus + posting them up on the hallway
- We wanted a way to inject a sense of continuity as well as have some memorabilia of each dinner. Having the polaroids and signed menus posted in the hallway give future guests the opportunity to see how Cheddar has evolved and all the past guests/menus. It’s a good way to pass time waiting for the full party and we love asking “which of the past menus would you be the most excited to try?“.
- Matching aprons
- I just wanted matching aprons hehe but also cooking with an apron is life changing it’s so helpful.
- Finalized Cheddar as the name
- The origin of Cheddar came from a ship name between Chiraag and Heather (think about it). At first, we thought it was a bit cringe to have that as our name but after using it as a placeholder for some time the name just stuck. I now think it’s quite endearing and homey sounding. Also, it ties back to our theme of fusion by being a blend of our names without being too in your face about it.
- Music
- We had the fan running for one of the sessions. When I went to turn it off, things suddenly became far too quiet and we realized the importance of having some background sound to fill in the silences. We now play soft jazz to add to the restaurant ambiance and contribute the auditory buffer.
- Chair around the side
- The setup of our dining space is a tall bar table that sits on the edge of our kitchen peninsula. Initially, all the chairs were lined up side to side facing in toward the kitchen where Chiraag and I would be cooking and entertaining. However, we noticed this created a “ping-pong” effect to conversation between individual guests/subsets and the kitchen.
- So we moved one of the chairs around to end of the table such that it was facing in toward the rest of the guests. This substantially altered the conversation flow. It felt like the shape of the conversation became much more circular and group-oriented, drastically improving conversation quality.
- Full party must be present
- We noticed starting the official conversation flow with only a portion of guests made it so that the ones who were late felt a bit more timid as a newcomer, especially given most of the guests are meeting each other for the first time. Also, it’s a good incentive to get people to come on time.
- Feedback form + Venmo donation QR codes
- More data point = more traction for improvement. Also, given we make a new menu blind every week, we find it helpful to get some honest feedback on our execution/idea.
- If this was a one-off thing then we’d happily cover the cost of dinner for our friends. However, because it’s a reoccurring cost, the donations have been really helpful to offset the costs. Of course, we never mandate anything, but luckily most patrons have been kind enough to help us out.
- Printed menu
- We (aka I) really wanted to design printed menus for the dinners. We considered doing a QR code digital menu, but I felt that the need to pull out your phone during the dinner took away from our ability to be present with each other. Also, it’s a cute keepsake and table decor.