The original Social Bites: hobby chefs, home dinners and DinnerPartyYVR
Long before this site existed, Social Bites was a Vancouver idea with a simple pitch: eat, meet, move your feet. An archived copy of the early site describes Dinner Excursions: evenings where food lovers visit the homes of hobby chefs, taste what is on offer and judge the dishes. Hobby chefs applied to cook; guests joined a list and heard about the next outing through an email alert. The site had pages for an event schedule, dinner passes, FAQs and a media room.
Walking from kitchen to kitchen
A food blogger writing in the early 2010s described it as a little project where you buy a ticket and then walk around a neighbourhood, visiting local hobby chefs who feed you. The same writer followed an edition built around vegan food. Other Vancouver food blogs and a local credit union's community site also mentioned the dinners over the years.
DinnerPartyYVR
In October 2013 the concept grew into #DinnerPartyYVR. Local event listings from that week describe dinners happening at the same time in more than 30 homes, with tickets at $35 per person that covered a dinner at a cook's home, a drink and entry to an after-party at Hawkers Market. Each host picked a charity, and the ticket money went to that charity.
By 2016, CBC reported that the event was in its fourth year, with about 500 hobby chefs hosting thousands of guests in their homes and raising money for causes they chose. The organiser's own site later said the dinners had raised close to $55,000 for charities.
Why we kept the name
Many writers linked to Social Bites over the years because the idea was generous and easy to explain. We have taken the name for a new magazine that covers the same ground in a different way: home cooking, hosting and the social side of food. We are not the people who ran those events, and we do not claim their results. If you were part of the original project and would like something corrected or added here, please get in touch.
Sources: archived copies of the early socialbites.ca site; CBC News (2016); Vancouver event listings from October 2013; Vancouver food blogs.