Friday, April 8, 2011

Urban Eating League

The Urban Eating League is a monthly locally-sourced progressive meal with a competitive tilt. Host sites buy and cook food (the cost is covered by the entry fee from the eaters). The teams of eaters travel around to all the different host sites. Eaters score the host sites on various categories (flavor, execution, hospitality, and creativity). The scores are tallied at the dessert potluck after-party and prizes and awards are handed out to the host sites.

Interested in being a host? Read the details below and e mail UEL@wiggparty.org to sign up for our next brunch (April 17th, BRUNCH! Or May 15th, in the evening!)


Host have the opportunity to show case their food, hospitality, and creative skills with a captive audience. The hosts are really the most important element of the event. These are the folks who put in the hard work to make sure the eaters have such an amazing time. Top scoring host sites win prizes, fame, and Internet publicity (posted on multiple bay area community websites). Plus, it’s FUN!

The hosts are responsible for planning a menu, finding the local ingredients, cooking the food, setting the environmental ambiance and overall experience, and generally making it all possible. To help entice people to be hosts (because it really is a challenging workload), we make sure to line up prizes to be awarded at the end of the evening, and we also offer anyone who helps on the hosting end status as “Very Important Eaters” i.e. they get first crack at being eaters in the next event (a serious draw considering the demand far exceeds the supply of eating slots in each UEL event).

We recommend that each host site has at least four people there to help during the event. The host sites need to be able to greet the teams upon entry and engage them in some sort of “front of the house experience” (e.g. performing a ceremony or a skit, setting expectations for the menu, explaining the theme, etc), have at least two people focused on cooking and plating the food, and have someone available to wash dishes in the time between each duo of teams leaves and the new duo arrives (we’ve found that 30 minutes at each site and 15 minutes to travel between sites works well - that means each host site has 15 minutes to “turn things over”).


Interesting in being an eater? Sign up at the Grove st. (@ Divsaedero) Farmers Market starting at 10am till we sell out (we usually sell out before noon).

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