What Happened 2 Weeks Ago?

Two weeks ago, I somehow managed to have a lovely bunch of women show up, gather, share stories, and eat together. Even writing that now feels slightly unreal.

It took me a week to come to terms with the fact that people had paid to eat food I cooked, and that I had, in fact, made that happen. Or at least the food part of it all. Without S, P, and A, none of it would have held. There are some people who’ll enter the chaos with you. They lift, carry, fix, host, notice, soften. To have people in your corner who rally for you like that feels like an earthly blessing so difficult to explain in words. I don’t know what I did to deserve that kind of love, but I know I was held by it.

The week after, I fell sick. Seasonal flu. Which feels fitting somehow, because my body finally did what my mind had no time to do before the dinner - collapse.

D-day itself felt like being dragged through every version of myself at once. From the walk through the flower market in the morning, to the last-minute prep, to being stuck in the kitchen for most of the dinner, there was so much relearning packed into a single day.

You know how sometimes you rely on muscle memory, and then muscle and memory both decide to screw you over? That happened. Back of house was a bust through and through. I was overheated, flustered, and so out of my element that front of house would have been a bust too if S and P weren’t holding it together outside the kitchen. 

There’s panic that comes from realising you cannot be in two places at once, while both places need you completely. And for all my romanticism about hosting, food, the table, the gathering, what the day forced me to confront was this: cooking for people is not the same thing as hosting them. Feeding people is not the same thing as being able to fully receive them.

The food, everyone said, was good. And I’m trying to let that land. But there’s this thing Andrea (Terry from The Bear) said that has stayed with me. Mind you, she said it to a room full of immaculate, celebrated, deeply passionate chefs and patissiers: people don’t remember the food. It’s the people they remember.

And that line has eaten me alive a little. Because if that’s true, then what remains of a night where I spent most of myself in the kitchen? What do people remember of me when I was too busy putting out fires to fully be there? What does hospitality mean when the host is unraveling just out of sight?

In all honesty, a lot of what happened on the 28th ate me alive for most of early April. All the things that went wrong. The things I might have taken too lightly because I was being cocky. The kitchen sink drain deciding to clog and flood. Oil dripping from one of the plates left in the bus tray. Not enough olive oil. The cake being too thin. The orange slices on the second cake being a little too thick. The olives not marinating the way I wanted them to. The anchovies being too salty, forcing a last-minute change to the dish. So many things slipping, shifting, almost falling apart.

It is incredible how the mind works after you make something vulnerable and public. It doesn’t think of what happened. It thinks of what could have been better. It replays details no one else noticed and hands them back to you like accusations. It makes a small oil stain feel like a moral failure. A thin cake becomes evidence that you were underprepared. A flooded sink becomes proof that you had no business doing this in the first place.

And yet. Somehow, it all happened.

People came. They sat together. They ate. They spoke. Something warm and living existed in that room for a few hours because I decided to try. That has to count for something. 

I think what shook me most was the sheer intimacy of being witnessed in the middle of trying to build something I care about. There is nothing casual about asking people to step into something you made with your own hands. It is not just food. It is taste, labour, timing, instinct, ego, memory, generosity, insecurity. It is all of those things making an appearance at the table together.

And perhaps that is why it hurt so much after. Because the dinner wasn’t just an event. It was a confrontation. With my limits and vanity. With my desire to do things beautifully. With the parts of me that still believe that if something isn’t perfect, it is not worthy of being loved.

Life, for all its timing, does not wait around for us to become neater, wiser, or more certain before it moves. And maybe that is what is so universal about feeling lost. Most people are trying to make sense of their lives while being carried forward by them. Sooner or later, what once felt unfamiliar becomes the new normal. Or close enough. You learn how to keep your questions to yourself. You learn how to function inside uncertainty. You stop expecting a grand moment of clarity and begin building routines around not knowing.

But even then, life curves.

And with over 8 billion people to compare ourselves to, it becomes frighteningly easy to believe that everyone else has figured out some vital thing before you have. That they are surer, steadier, more disciplined, more equipped. That their risks are cleaner, outcomes more elegant and their becoming more linear.

It becomes difficult to figure out what the right decisions are when everyone is living such wildly different lives and still making them look coherent from the outside. And even more difficult, I think, is learning to give oneself grace in the thick of that confusion. To accept that trying and fumbling and misjudging and recovering are not signs that you are failing life, but signs that you are in it. Sometimes being lost is not a detour, it is the terrain.

Then, I reckon, that the lesson is not in getting it all right, but in seeing what remains true even when a lot goes wrong. Who shows up. What holds. What still nourishes. What you would do differently next time, yes, but also what you are now capable of because you dared to do it once.

I am learning, slowly and unwillingly, that making something real will always cost you some illusion. You lose the fantasy of how seamless it would have been. You lose the version of yourself who thought passion alone could carry the weight of execution. You lose a certain innocence. But in return, you get something far more useful: texture. Specificity. A truer relationship with the thing you say you want. And maybe that is what these last two weeks have been. 

What Happens Next?

We’re experimenting with a different format.

A sit-down, 6-course dinner.

A little more intentional. A lot closer to the kind of experience I think I was trying to create all along.

So, come?