Community Dining Isn’t Disappearing, It’s Evolving

The decline of chain dining doesn’t spell the end of gathering; it marks a new beginning at our own tables.

Image via Pinterest — credit: Leandra Hernon

The Fear of Vanishing Togetherness

Meghan McCarron, writing in The New York Times, recently reflected on the decline of the middle-class restaurant, pointing to the closures of TGI Fridays, Pizza Hut dining rooms, and other once-ubiquitous chains as a warning that working- and middle-class families are losing their most reliable gathering spaces. For decades, these restaurants offered affordable sit-down meals where families could be served, linger at a table, and feel part of something larger than themselves. If those booths and salad bars vanish, the fear goes, so too does the sense of togetherness they once fostered.

But togetherness doesn’t live or die with chain restaurants. It’s not tied to booths, salad bars, or laminated menus. In fact, it’s already alive elsewhere, in supper clubs, in dinner parties, in kitchens and borrowed spaces where food becomes the excuse to gather. These aren’t stand-ins for restaurants, they are reinventions of what dining together can mean.

Food as Art, Food as Craft

As a food and drink photographer, food appears very differently to me. I see it less as fuel and more as art; every dish carries the weight of a chef’s entire background: the long climb from kitchen porter to head chef, shaped by endless prep lists, fourteen-hour shifts, the burns that never quite heal and the repetition that turns chaos into muscle memory. By the time it reaches the table, the food is more than flavour, it’s the distilled result of all of the graft, training and discipline.

At home on an ordinary night, most of us cook to get fed. Dinner is quick, functional, and rarely beautiful, but when people gather, everything shifts. Care that would feel excessive in solitude suddenly feels essential. A table is set. Candles are lit. Mismatched plates are chosen deliberately, a garnish is added not for taste but for the pleasure of how it looks, and music is picked to guide the pace of the evening.

 Food is the language we use to tell people we value them. And in recent years, as I’ve found my own people, friends and a partner who love to gather, to eat, to build these small but vivid worlds around a table, I’ve realised how deeply we are reinventing what dining together looks like.

Supper Clubs and Commensality

This is why I can’t agree with McCarron’s sense of loss. The booths may be empty, but the tables are full elsewhere. Togetherness hasn’t died with chain restaurants, it’s simply found new hosts, new formats, and in many ways, a stronger sense of purpose. The surge of supper clubs and dinner parties isn’t just a trend for food obsessives; it’s proof that people still crave the act of gathering, and they’re willing to shape new rituals when the old ones fall away.

Across cities and towns, supper clubs are flourishing. Some are polished ticketed events in borrowed studios, where the chef can cook what excites them rather than what will keep a menu profitable. Others are scrappier, more intimate, twenty people packed elbow to elbow in someone’s living room, sharing dishes passed around like family. In both cases, the heart of it is the same: food as connection, food as community – what anthropologists call commensality, the act of eating together.

Food as an Experience, Not a Transaction

The Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija explored this in his work Untitled (Free), where he turned gallery spaces like MoMA into kitchens, cooking curry and serving it to visitors. The art wasn’t on the walls, it was in the commensality — in the gathering itself, in strangers sitting down to share food and conversation.

That same principle is alive in today’s supper clubs and dinner parties. Even the classic dinner party feels transformed. It’s no longer just about a host showing off their cooking; it’s about creating a night where atmosphere, music, and detail matter. Friends gather not only to eat but to inhabit a space of intention. People are putting into these nights the kind of aesthetic and emotional labour that restaurants once handled for us. That’s not loss; that’s reinvention.

If the Times suggests that without chain restaurants we risk losing togetherness, I’d argue the opposite. The decline of those restaurants has forced us to be more inventive, to take ownership of our dining rituals rather than outsourcing them. Instead of being customers, we’ve become participants. Instead of being served, we serve each other. And in that shift, the social fabric doesn’t fray; it tightens.