Supper Clubs and "Apartment Cafes": The New Age of Hosting

After moving out of her family home, 24-year-old Maya Aristimuño missed sitting around the table and eating her meals with loved ones. So in 2021, once the pandemic restrictions were lifted in New York City, she started inviting friends over to her apartment every Tuesday for dinners. She didn’t have a dining table or matching tableware. Instead, friends would gather around her coffee table, sitting cross-legged on the living room floor. Whatever plates couldn’t fit on the coffee table would be held by one another.

Since then, the founder of the marketing agency Maristi Creative has opened up her dinner parties to her online followers, hosting pop-up dinners at restaurants and wine bars in New York, Paris, and Barcelona (where she’s now based), and sometimes at her own apartment. Brands like Adobe Photoshop, Ultimate Ears, Graza, and San Pellegrino have sponsored her events or helped cover the cost of ingredients in exchange for a spot on the menu. "When brands started realizing that community-driven experiences are where people actually want to be, they began reaching out to sponsor," says Aristimuño.

The act of hosting a formal dinner party has traditionally been a way to show off wealth and social status, tracing back to ancient Greek and Roman feasts and royal banquets in the medieval and Victorian eras. By the mid-19th century, dining rooms were a staple of single-family American homes, and by the mid-20th century, as the postwar economy boomed and the middle class grew, hosting glamorous cocktail parties and dinners became a popular way to entertain guests and show one’s social circle. Martha Stewart’s homemaking empire in the 1980s and ’90s espoused similar values of extravagance and effort, where preparations started at least a week in advance and caviar was sprinkled as liberally as salt. Michael Smith, the author of the 1987 book Handbook for Hosts: The Complete Guide to Successful Entertaining at Home, described it as "unthinkable to serve either crisps or nuts or twiglets." He wrote, "any host who cannot organize a simple cheese shortbread, some canapés, and freshly pickled olives has his priorities seriously a-twist."

Fast-forward to 2012 and a New York Times article declared the dinner parties of old dead. Cash- and space-poor millennials were suddenly too preoccupied to bother with the multicourse, formal dinner party of decades past. Hosting also required having a home big enough to comfortably seat half a dozen people. People increasingly opted for eating at restaurants and meeting friends at bars, "essentially outsourcing the act of entertaining to other businesses," says Chelsea Fagan, author of the 2025 guidebook Having People Over.

Now, a decade on, young Americans are spending less on going out to eat, worn down from years of inflation and rising restaurant prices. (The first half of 2025 saw weaker sales growth for restaurants and bars in the U.S. than during the pandemic, according to a CNN analysis of Commerce Department data.) A reshaping of the ways people are getting together and hosting is afoot, and it’s a sign of the times: The cost of living keeps rising. Third spaces are disappearing. We’re spending notably more time at home, and loneliness is pervasive. (A 2025 Atlantic essay titled "Americans Need to Party More" cited Bureau of Labor Statistics findings that just 4.1 percent of Americans attended or hosted a social event on an average weekend or holiday in 2023.) Younger generations in particular are also shifting away from alcohol-fueled nights out. Instead, they’re driving up a surge in events where they can connect over shared interests, often utilizing spaces that either are at home or recreate the feel of a home.

"Hosting [today] has a totally different vibe than the big, everyone-you’ve-ever-met parties of the past," says Olivia Pollock, online invitation company Evite’s etiquette and hosting expert. "It’s about smaller, sweeter moments that feel personal." Potlucks and informal gatherings are a more affordable way to socialize. "We’re also seeing a rise in ‘microjoy’ gatherings," says Pollock. "Think book clubs, pet birthdays, or any excuse to bring your people together. The energy is cozier, more intentional and way more ‘come as you are.’"

"If you don’t have a home to host in, a lot of restaurants and dining spaces and cool spots now are opening up to become that third space," says Aristimuño. Supper club and pop-up dinner events have risen 18 percent on Eventbrite, with over 25,000 attendees and nearly 9,000 searches this past year, according to platform data shared with Dwell. Groups like Dallas Girl Gang and supper clubs like The Salon in New York host ticketed pop-up dinners for like-minded people to network and find community. Start-ups like Hauste and Canary, meanwhile, offer menu and tablescape ideas, plate rentals, and curated playlists for those who want to host professional-feeling dinner parties of their own. Brands are, of course, also capitalizing on the trend, sponsoring influencers to host their own dinner parties with friends and capture it for their audiences with paid product placements or mentions, or tapping popular supper clubs like Aristimuño’s to host their product launches and brand activations. Gen Z is also bringing back communal dining at restaurants, with 90 percent of Gen Z diners saying they enjoy shared tables, according to new Resy data.

When they aren’t going out, a new generation of hosts are getting creative at home, turning their apartments into makeshift coffeehouses for friends. Some of these viral concepts have since graduated into pop-ups outside the home. Saturday Cafe, which started in Montreal-based content creator Victoria Lauren Da Silva’s living room, now hosts pop-ups across the city. Others have turned into brick-and-mortar spots, such as New York’s viral L’Appartement 4F. Born out of a couple’s fourth floor walk up during the pandemic the cafe and bakery expanded to locations in Brooklyn Heights and the West Village as demand exceeded capacity.

The act of hosting has increasingly become its own content niche online, blurring the boundaries between private gathering and public performance. The hashtag #hostingtips has over 34,500 videos on TikTok, and modern-day Martha Stewarts gain millions of followers across their social media profiles. Themed dinner party series inspired by films or TV shows often rack up hundreds of thousands of views. "Nearly one in four hosts are actually planning gatherings with content-friendly moments in mind," says Pollock.

Yet, the pressure to play the perfect host, now to an online audience, in many ways mirrors the pressures that caused many people to turn away from entertaining guests in the first place. "Most of what you see on social media, in terms of hosting, is a performance," says Fagan. "Often it’s just an outright advertisement."

To push back, some are encouraging seeing hosting as a hobby rather than a perfect art. "Getting good at hosting and being a person who gathers your friends or your community...that is itself a hobby," says Fagan. "It’s also a very important social role."

That’s how 25-year-old content creator Olivia Carlson sees it. Since college, her room would always be where friends came to hang out. "I always had snacks in my little mini fridge," she says. "It slowly evolved into something a little bit bigger." Now she hosts friends at her home in Virginia at least once a quarter. Rather than purchasing new, Carlson thrifts decor from places like Goodwill. It’s not important that everything matches and she doesn’t feel the pressure to dress up to the nines. "You can host without breaking an arm and a leg to do it," she says. While Carlson insists that guests surrender their phones when they step into her home, keeping them in a bowl away from the table, she also shares her hosting tips and checklists to her 337,000 followers on TikTok.

Hosting might’ve always blended performance and actual connection, but in the era of social media and influencer marketing, those lines are even less clear. A 2025 Town & Country story, for example, noted the rise of parlor games and table-wide conversation prompts as "forced fun" at dinner parties, particularly those sponsored by brands.

This comes at a time when the performance of homekeeping has regained social currency, with the tradwife lifestyle and aesthetic trending online and being reflected in U.S. politics. But much in the same way as a tradwife influencer, the fantasy of the perfect host is an unattainable ideal, one that, when you mix in social media, primarily exists to sell something. Today’s supper clubs, pop-up dinners, and apartment cafes follow less formal rules about style than their predecessors, but their function in helping those who host them craft their image and personal brand isn’t all that different. The main change is that whereas once hosts only had to impress their guest list, now the whole internet is invited.

Top photo by Elena Noviello/Getty Images

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