How a Gen Zer turned his dinner party into a business focused on busting intergenerational loneliness

• Tyler Tep founded The Dinner Table, a social dining community for communal meals with strangers.
• Social dining and dinner parties are trending as Americans seek good food and socialization.
• This article is part of "Made to Order," a series highlighting the business strategies driving today's food industry.

Tyler Tep, 26, might be responsible for your next dinner party.

Tep is the founder of The Dinner Table, a new social dining community that's serving up communal meals for customers craving both food and socialization. Tep is hopping on a growing trend, as social dining and dinner parties are experiencing more robust demand. Americans want to see other people, and they want to eat — dinner parties offer a chance for both.

Of course, any new venture brings its challenges. For dinner party entrepreneurs, that means designing and executing something new in a notoriously difficult restaurant industry.

Over two conversations, Tep spoke with Business Insider about his journey — and challenges — creating The Dinner Table.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

What's your first memory of a dinner party?

When we first started, the intention was never for The Dinner Table to become a social dining community that's across the US. Initially, it was just for me and my roommates to make friends. So, my first dinner party was our attempt at meeting new people in New York; we hosted a dinner with a private chef who came to our apartment and cooked a meal for about 20 of our friends and their mutual friends. It was a great gathering.

What happened next that you were like, we have to keep doing this?

We hosted the first dinner party for our friends, and they absolutely loved it, and they were telling their friends about it — so it kind of just built on itself. Their friends wanted to come to the next one and they were asking us when we're hosting again. We hosted a second dinner a few weeks later where we got to meet more people. After the first few that we hosted, we figured, why don't we open this up to the public and also open this up to different venues across New York City? It was really in about four to eight weeks that we decided, wow, we actually have something here.

It was very resounding that there was an appetite and a demand for it. That's how we snowballed into the model that we have now.

Have there been any unexpected challenges when planning these types of events?

If you speak to any event coordinator or event-based company, the nature of events is very unpredictable. Then, when you throw in the component of working within a restaurant, that's always been unpredictable as well.

To mitigate that, we build a network of restaurant partners that are anywhere between 12 and 15 restaurants in each of the markets we operate in. These are restaurant partners that we've worked with in the past. They're familiar with our events, they're familiar with us, and likewise with them.

At times, we can see the breakdown of attendees skew more toward women — and in some cases, very dramatically toward women. So sometimes we hear, "I wish there were more men in attendance," or "I wish there was a more diverse array of men that were coming to even out the distribution of genders at the event." I think that's one we hear quite a bit, and I think that's pretty consistent in the events business as well — getting men to come out.

One way we mitigate that is we create gender tickets — men's and women's tickets — for the sole purpose of ensuring that we'll have a baseline number of men in attendance. But that's definitely one logistical challenge, that we're being inclusive to all the attendees and all the guests within our community, but also ensuring an optimal dining experience and mingling experience for our guests as well.

Have you ever had a moment where you're just like, oh my gosh, there are too many things going on?

Always. Taking a step back, I never saw The Dinner Table being what it is today, and I'm immensely proud of what it has become. Now what I do see is the potential of what it can be and how much interest there is in it. But I also recognize that what I've already built with The Dinner Table is already really cool and incredible.

I have an immense amount of appreciation for being able to do something like this. It's a privilege to have this opportunity. Not many people have an opportunity to do things like this with The Dinner Table.

When I think about how I manage and balance my days, it very recently has come from a place of appreciation for the work and for my position.

It really helps me through the tough days and gets me through the busy days that the alternative is to not do The Dinner Table — and that is way less interesting, way less creative, and way less fun, frankly.

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