What 2,400 Events Taught Me About How People Actually Experience Food

The moment I know an event has worked — really worked, not just gone smoothly — has nothing to do with the food.

It's when guests start clearing the table.

Not because they feel obligated. Not because they're trying to be polite. But because somewhere between the first course and the last, they forgot they were guests at all. They started to feel at home. And when people feel at home, they do what they do at home: they help. They stack the plates. They carry glasses to the kitchen. Once, memorably, a guest I'd never met before quietly started loading my dishwasher without saying a word, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

That's the benchmark. Everything I've learned across 2,400 events — from intimate dinners for six in my Prague studio to large-scale brand activations for Fortune 500 companies — comes back to that single question: did people forget they were at an event?

The illusion of ease

I've been cooking professionally for over twelve years, across four countries, for everyone from Hollywood celebrities to corporate teams to heads of state. In that time I've developed what I can only describe as a performance — not in the theatrical sense, but in the athletic one. Every movement in the kitchen is deliberate. Every timing decision has been made in advance. The mise en place is so complete before anyone arrives that the actual cooking, when guests watch it happen, looks almost effortless.

"You make it look so easy," people say. They say it constantly.

I used to deflect this. Now I understand it as the highest possible compliment, and also as the entire point. Making something look easy is not the absence of skill — it is the fullest expression of it. The ease they're seeing is the result of thousands of hours of preparation, repetition, and refinement, compressed into a two-hour experience that feels spontaneous.

But here's what I've learned matters more than the technique: what that apparent ease does to the people watching.

When guests see food being prepared without stress, without drama, without the chaotic energy that most people associate with cooking for a group — something shifts in them. They stop being spectators and start being participants. They lean in. They ask questions. They pick up a utensil and try something. And by the end of the evening, almost without exception, they say a version of the same thing: I've never tasted food like that, but watching you gives me hope that I could do it myself.

That sentence is why I do this work.

What food actually does at an event

I've worked with enough brands and corporate clients to know that most people think about event food entirely wrong. They think about it as fuel — something to keep guests fed and happy while the real business of the event happens around them. They spend enormous energy on the venue, the agenda, the speakers, the branding — and then treat the catering as a logistical problem to be solved rather than an opportunity to be seized.

This is a mistake, and it shows.

I have sat through countless corporate dinners where the food was technically fine — well-sourced, competently prepared, professionally served — and yet the room never quite came alive. The conversations stayed surface-level. People checked their phones between courses. The meal ended and everyone dispersed quickly, the way you leave a cinema rather than the way you leave a dinner party.

Food that is merely adequate creates adequate experiences. It fills a gap without opening one.

What I've learned, over thousands of events, is that food has a specific social function that goes far beyond nutrition or even pleasure. It is one of the few activities that requires people to be simultaneously vulnerable and present. You cannot eat well while distracted. You cannot fully experience a meal while performing. When food is genuinely surprising — when a flavour combination catches someone off guard, or a technique produces something they've never encountered — it creates a moment of involuntary openness. Guards come down. Conversations deepen. Strangers become, briefly, something closer to friends.

This is not an accident. It is something that can be designed for, if you understand it.

The dishwasher principle

I've started thinking of that dishwasher moment as a design principle rather than a happy accident. The question I now ask at the start of every event — whether it's an intimate dinner for eight or a brand activation for two hundred — is: what would it take for these people to forget they're guests?

The answers are always specific to the event, the guests, the space. But certain things come up consistently.

Scale matters more than most people realise. There is an intimacy threshold beyond which genuine connection becomes structurally impossible, regardless of how good the food is. My Prague studio holds a maximum of 8 for a seated dinner indoors and 24 outdoors. This is not a capacity limitation — it's a design decision. Above a certain number, you're no longer hosting a dinner. You're managing a crowd.

Participation matters. The events where guests watch the cooking — where the kitchen is open, where questions are welcomed, where someone can come and stand next to me while I finish a sauce — consistently produce more connected, more memorable experiences than events where the food simply appears from somewhere unseen. Mystery is fine for a restaurant. For an intimate event, visibility is more powerful.

And time matters in a way that most event planners actively work against. The pressure to keep things moving, to fill every moment, to deliver a packed programme — this is the enemy of the dishwasher moment. The best events I've produced have always had space in them. Long pauses between courses. Unhurried conversations. The sense that nobody needs to be anywhere else.

What I actually learned from 2,400 events

If I had to compress everything into a single observation, it would be this: people do not remember what they ate. They remember how they felt while eating it.

This is not a criticism of food — it is the highest possible statement about its power. The specific dishes from any given evening will fade. The flavours will blur. What remains, sometimes for years, is an emotional impression: the feeling of being welcomed, of being surprised, of being cared for in a way that felt genuine rather than professional.

The guests who load my dishwasher are not helping me clean up. They are, without knowing it, completing the experience. They are expressing, in the most domestic and unguarded way possible, that for a few hours they felt completely at home in someone else's kitchen.

After 2,400 events, that still feels like the whole point.

Mariko Amekodommo is an international culinary expert and cross-cultural brand advisor based in Prague. Her work has appeared in ELLE Gourmet, BBC Travel, Grazia, and The Food Institute. She covers the intersection of gastronomy, luxury, and global culture.