My Mega HN Dinner Party (32 people, 7 courses) | Hacker News Reader

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

blog.bumblebeelabs.com

74 pointsshalmanese30 comments

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.

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

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

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/

there's nothing there?

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.

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

> 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.

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

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.

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

Hah, I'd love to hear that. I'll be it's even worse than European Mexican food.

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.

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!

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 :).

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Duck lasagne was my fave. Tx Hang!

Seven courses of instant ramen, I hope.

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

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