I wanted friends so I built a foodie social club
how I built a community of foodie friends
In 2021 I remember driving home with takeout by myself for the 10th time that week. I thought to myself, “damn, I need some friends”. I was getting sick and tired of not having anyone to share the memories of trying and eating incredible food in LA.
Eating food is one of my favorite things in the world. I’ll do it alone if I have to. But the ideal situation is eating delicious, noteworthy food with people who share my enthusiasm and appreciation for dining out. That said, there is a dilemma with coordinating times to eat out with such people - and it’s a pain the ass. Sometimes people don’t want what you want. Or you send a date and time in the group chat and one person can’t make it so now nobody can go. Or someone tries to convince you that you want something else. FOH lol.
After the traumatic experience of realizing how lonely I was, I began to think, “I can’t be the only one who struggles with this”. I was actually getting kind of mad. I knew everybody generally liked eating food and hanging out, but why in the world did coordinating seem so impossible?
In my angst I started texting everybody on my contact list that I thought enjoyed the experiencing of eating food. As I reached out, I asked what they liked about the dining experience and what they wish they had more of. To my surprise, 75% of people said they wanted to hear the story behind the restaurant and signature dishes.
So I thought, “I just need a restaurant and chef to tell the story behind their food”. Say less. LA Meet & Eat (@lameetandeat) was born. I started an IG account, followed some foodie-looking profiles, and reached out to restaurants. After some persistent follow-up, Matt, founder and owner of Lowkey Burritos (60K on IG and the best breakfast burrito in LA), agreed to do an event. A handful of DM’s later and nine people rsvp’d to attend. Here’s a pic from that LA Meet & Eat’s very first event:
Building LA Meet & Eat was an adventure of a lifetime. In one year, 250 people attended 50 events that I put on in partnership with 25 restaurants. Two publications wrote profiles on LA Meet & Eat (check them out here and here). I made friends that I still hang out with to this day. I heard so many incredible stories from owners, chefs, and attendees alike, and enjoyed a ton of incredible food.
At some point I had an entire team of people helping me run the club. The energy was unreal and I was grateful to have created something that people really resonated with.
After a year of running the club, the experience began to lose its magic. People started attending for the discounted food and restaurants passed down increasing food costs to the attendees. As attendance prices went up, fewer people came to the events. I decided to close down the club in light of these changes.
All this to say, I found an incredible community to be a part of by building one. I found something I truly loved in eating food and sought to do it with other people. I involved as many people as I could and, as it turns out, inclusivity can be a pretty cool catalyst for community.
You don’t have to go to the extent I did to find community, but you can start with something you’re passionate about and see where it goes.
If you think I should bring back LA Meet & Eat type of experiences, reply directly to this email and tell me which restaurant’s story you’d want to hear. I’ll reach out and see what happens.
Anyway, here are some shots from the other events I put on:
(Chef Keith, owner and head chef of Alta Adams located in West Adams)
(Hiram Mac, owner of Bombay Frankie Company located in Culver City)
Since you’re here I wanted to share a few thoughts from my friend Andy Chen on design. He’s honestly helped me a ton in becoming a better designer, specifically recognizing what looks good and why. He wants to help more people with creating better stuff. Reach out to him for your design needs (i.e. logo, branding, etc). He’s currently a co-founder of a productivity startup, CuroWork and he graduated from Cornell’s School of Architecture, Art, and Planning.
3 LA design programs that helped me succeed as a designer (pt. 1)
By Andy Chen
I've been working with the same two art teachers on and off since I was in my teens they’ve been absolutely essential in my design training. I've received some of the best advice in my personal and professional career from them and would love to start by sharing what separates them from other instructors.
Nestled in a small strip mall in the San Gabriel Valley inconspicuously sits one of the best design programs in the world for K-12. Don’t let that fool you though, their approach works for anyone at any age, though their early education and portfolio program is what sets them apart from other similar programs.
The husband and wife duo of Rebecca Chen and Corey Peters are the founders of RBAA, Right Brain Academy of Art in San Gabriel, CA. They are two of the best art and design educators I've been fortunate enough to have worked with among the wide variety of design programs I've sought out. A lot of what separates Corey and Rebecca comes down to their mindset in how they approach design education in relation to your career path and goals in life.
Lesson 1: Develop good taste
The first key differentiator is how they help in developing a sensibility and taste which helps you understand where the bar for skill level and also where the skill ceiling is with a medium or design career path. We still will have a laugh to this day over me coming into class in middle school wanting to do similar super cool work that I saw on DeviantArt for them to tell me there were far better artists to emulate and study out there. It was hard for a kid at the time to understand when all the content I loved at the time was Naruto, Bleach, One Piece but I always appreciate how much it has helped to understand that so early on. Had I continued idolizing and emulating the anime hobbyists' work I thought was so great - I would have had a rough reality check years down the line when that doesn't cut it in the professional world.
I would say this is one of the most important concepts to understand as early as possible in pursuing a design career - the depth and breadth of what you are getting yourself into and where you want to fall in your respective field's spectrum. Is your goal for the arts to be therapeutic and act as an escape for you, or to become something to supplement other skill sets, or to eventually become a successful career path? The latter route is what I primarily speak about with learning design and the approach at RBAA is incredibly simple but powerful.
Lesson 2: Preparing a foundation to succeed long term
Your typical high school level art school portfolio prep program's goal is to get you to submit a portfolio that gets you admitted to a design program - this is often executed incredibly short sightedly and often homogenizes your skillset and work into a formulaic copy of the template they have.
RBAA's goal is not just to ensure that you actually succeed in getting admittance to your top design program but that you also excel during your time there - as well as the following goal to succeed beyond it as a professional. Most understand that design school can be challenging but for RBAA they know their process will get students admitted, but they want to ensure that they are the top performers at every stage of their education and career.
To accomplish this requires a different approach where it caters firstly towards developing the work ethic you need to produce the quality and volume a professional is able to, secondly to develop a foundational understanding of good design, and thirdly to practice towards your goal day in and out. The nice part of this approach is you will not be 'tricked.' If you decide you want to pursue this path and are training to be a professional designer from day one then you will very quickly realize if the pace and work is something you enjoy or not versus taking it one safe step at a time and potentially making this discovery too late into the journey.
The approach may seem simple but I think the realism and directness to teens is incredibly useful. I believe a big detractor in most pre-college art classrooms is the unproductive inclusivity and acceptance that anything anybody creates is beautiful. Though teaching this is important, on the road to becoming a professional group discussions about feelings over a piece is a waste of time. You need to understand what is working and what is not, fast and the reasons why.
Lesson 3: Job security via high quality
That is another benefit in working with Corey and Rebecca, often with some art teachers you hit their ceiling of useful feedback, but with this duo there seems to always be a clear and highly elevated path towards improving your design. In a world where people are incredibly black and white with what they buy and who they hire, there is little room for 'average' work thereby making it incredibly difficult to gain the appropriate amount of experience needed to transition from entry level to intermediate and advanced.
You are seeing a greater tension in the market now with how generative AI is raising the bar exponentially on how rapidly and how high quality designs can be created. This is causing disruptions in how the industry approaches nearly every step of the creative process a la the writer strikes.
One of the simplest ways to ensure job security is to fill in a niche that suits your skillset. It is always easiest to get your foot in the door when your work is differentiated in some way, without detracting from it. The other way is to - easier said than done - get better, it is possible and more of a game of time and effort than anything else. However, if you are already training to succeed at the collegiate art school level in high school like RBAA teaches and then training to succeed as a professional in college - you will be that many years ahead of your peers.
This might be why none of RBAA's alum have any difficulty with finding a design job after graduating, and speaking from personal experience having worked with one another alum - it is immediately obvious how many years ahead of his peers his work was and how easily we were able to communicate and get aligned on concepts down to execution.
I think the point in me sharing Rebecca and Corey's process is because they have an incredible format toto take someone's design skills from zero to one at any age level largely through building awareness of professional skill levels and taste along with building one's work ethic and fundamentals. Ten out of ten times I would recommend someone to start with them rather than wasting time wandering in the dark attempting to figure out the incredibly nebulous discipline of art and design. The biggest leaps I've made in design understanding, analysis, and skill have been with them so to this day I still continue to work with and get feedback from them.
That's it for part one! Part two and three will cover Sci-Arc's (Southern California Institute of Architecture) Making and Meaning summer program and Art Center's at Night (now called Extension I believe) programs.
 | A guest post by
|