To Be Hosted: More Than Just a Seat at the Table
Images Courtesy of To Be Hosted. Originally published in AphroChic magazine Issue 12, Summer 2023.
“Our dinner parties are about ownership, belonging, leisure, and community,” says Amber Mayfield, founder of To Be Hosted, an innovative supper club that hosts dinners focused on highlighting Black food culture and building community. “We gather at one table, share a family-style meal, and have meaningful conversation.”
Amber is a master curator. The Forbes Under 30 alum who came from the world of tele- vision, started the supper club as a side hustle. The first events were held wherever space could be found — the basement of a brown- stone in Harlem, a coffee shop, or a co-working space after hours. Six years later, the brand has grown considerably, holding pop-ups across the country and producing events for Netflix, Pinterest, and YouTube.
For each dinner, Amber features delicious food from a rotating line-up of Black chefs. Dinners in New York, Atlanta, and Los Angeles have featured cuisine from across the African Diaspora, including African American and Caribbean food cultures. Each evening’s events are guided by a perfect menu with several courses, beginning with starters and ending with a stunning dessert. But it’s not just about the food. “With each gathering, we aim to build community, spark meaningful dialogue, and inspire our guests far beyond our dinner tables,” says Amber.
To attend a To Be Hosted supper club dinner, interested diners are asked to complete a profile on the website. The questions are inter- esting, inviting, and introspective: What do you do for love? What are you passionate about? What type of media do you enjoy? What art do you regularly enjoy? And they don’t stop at the initial survey. As a dinner guest, menu cards embossed with the To Be Hosted logo include a series of questions to help guide discussion around the evening’s theme.
At a recent dinner around the theme of A Return, guests were asked: Where are you from? And how often do you return to your childhood home? How do you re-connect with your inner child? What do you do to re-center? Far from the typical ice breakers at a dinner party, the thoughtful questions, paired with equally thoughtful design, invite guests to enjoy dinner as an experience, where they can feel cared for, enriched through meaning- ful dialogue, and free to be themselves, even amongst strangers.
Through food that celebrates the diversity of Black culture and a gathering curated with intention, Amber has taken entertaining to an artistic level, making the dinner table a place to nourish the body and feed the soul. At a To Be Hosted dinner, guests are made to feel the truth of the brand’s mission: You deserve to be here. You deserve to be seen and heard. You deserve to be nourished. You deserve to take the night off. You deserve to be handled with great care. You deserve the nice things, the good wine, the good time (and the long time). You deserve the seat and the table. You deserve To Be Hosted.
Explore the Aesthetic
