How Neighborhood Dinners Are Rebuilding Community

Dinner parties were something my parents taught me to host.

Not the fancy kind, like the ones they show you in movies, where everyone is dressed up, and drinks and food are served as a secondary thing. Dinners at my family’s house were simply extending our table, literally, pulling up a few more chairs from our children’s rooms, and setting it with the not-so-matching tablecloth and tableware, waiting for guests to come over.

My dad used to be the one in the kitchen. Once the cooking started, we’d leave him to his kitchen kingdom, occasionally hearing a cough, which meant the dishes were about to be ready—hot and spicy. My mom, to this day an entertainer and natural host, kept cracking jokes (sometimes unwillingly) and making conversation.

In retrospect, I think this was one of the ways we, as an immigrant family, made and held friendships. Inviting others in. I don’t remember us being invited to others much—it did happen for a birthday or so, but to our disappointment, the food was never really matching up.

Perhaps this is where my love for dinners got sparked. As it is for many of us: gathering over food, across cultures, remains something we all share.

So when I started my Shared Table Dinner series last year, my feed filled up with different kinds of dinners, including The Longest Table community, which had been around for a few years already.

Inviting co-founder Maryam Banikarim onto The Oneliness Podcast (Spotify| Apple) was just an Instagram DM away from there. So here we are.

Maryam Banikarim was born in Iran, and left as a child, overnight, in the middle of the revolution, as if the family were just going on vacation. They never went back. From there, her childhood became a map of places: Tehran, Boston, Paris, California, Argentina, Chicago, until she landed in New York for college, and says that's where she finally found her voice. A city of eight million people, she says, where there's eight of every kind of person, so nobody enforces conformity — you're free to just be yourself.

That search for belonging followed her into a 25-year career as a CMO and senior marketing executive at Univision, NBCUniversal, Gannett, Hyatt, Nextdoor.

And eventually, to co-founding NYCNext during the pandemic and The Longest Table: a free neighborhood potluck that started with a single post on Nextdoor in Chelsea and has since spread to 30+ cities across the US and beyond. She’s also an Emmy Award-winning storyteller and host of The Messy Parts Podcast.

Maryam jokes that she had 60 jobs before she had five big ones. A lot of those were change-and-turnaround roles, and she’s clear about what actually moves things in that kind of work.

“You can have all the strategy in the world, but you need people to take the hill. And for them to follow you, they have to trust you. They have to believe you’re not going to take them off a cliff.”

And yet, after years inside the corporate hierarchy, she has no illusions about what it actually gives you:

“Corporate hierarchy is not a family, and it’s not where you’re going to find belonging. A title isn’t going to find you belonging. It’s not going to hug you back.”

She’s watched it happen to peers again and again. Someone builds their identity around a role — and then the company sells, or they’re laid off, or they burn out and step away. What follows is often an identity crisis that has nothing to do with money:

“They’re not used to walking into a room and being asked what do you do, and not being able to answer. They’re not used to having the phone not ring in the same way that it did.”

The Longest Table started with no business plan. Just an instinct, during the early pandemic, when Maryam was in Chelsea longer than she’d stayed anywhere in years, and finally started meeting her neighbors.

She saw a photo online, a long table down a street, people sharing a meal. She posted it on Nextdoor: what if we did that? Eight neighbors she’d never met got in touch.

What actually makes it work, she’s come to understand, is mainly the shared space of the neighborhood itself.

“If I invite you into my house, and my house is fancier than yours, you feel lesser than. This is about a space that really does belong to everyone. When you’re on the street, that’s all of ours.”

People who meet Maryam and hear about The Longest Table tend to ask the same question first: “How are you monetizing it?”

She isn’t. And increasingly, she doesn’t think she should be.

“When people finally realized that there was no agenda — literally no agenda other than to connect people — it really took the air out of the balloon. People just showed up differently. And that’s the truth.”

Over 1,600 people have reached out wanting to host their own table. She still personally answers nearly everyone.

“Part of what makes somebody take the baton is that they connect with a human being — that they feel seen and that they matter. And when you feel that I care, then you care. I think that thing is contagious.”

Thank you for your support.

If this resonated, share it with a person who might resonate. Rate and review the podcast; check out how you can participate or host your own Longest Table, join a Shared Table Dinner (July 16 in Berlin) or explore Daily Connect. Find more at monikajiang.org.

With love, as always,
Monika