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Sharing food, making friends

Updated: 2014-08-07 13:53
By Yu Ran (Shanghai Star)

 

Sharing food, making friends

Cherry Chen enjoys cooking for her new friends and dining with them.

Sharing food, making friends

Eat beat

Sharing food, making friends

A feast of stones 

To select the diners, Hu asked them to send brief introductions so he could decide who to invite. Even then, Hu still remembers how nervous he was the first time he greeted six strangers at the door of his apartment.

"I was very excited and worried if the atmosphere would get awkward or weird as most of us had never met before," Hu says.

By the time the first meal ended, one of the guests said to Hu that it was an amazing experience, and that he should organize another meal again. That was enough encouragement for him.

Now SweetSalt, as the couple have named their eat-and-socialize activity, is a regular dining event. It is like a family dining room now as his girlfriend has moved in recently and taken over the kitchen by cooking all kinds of dishes while Hu plays host chatting with the guests before the meal.

Most of the people who have been invited to the SweetSalt family dining room have become their friends, and regularly meet up with them.

"We're not only sharing food, but also exchanging ideas on everything like friends and family," says Chen, who works as a researcher at a global cosmetics company.

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