Overview

Taco Tuesday is a weekly dinner, held at my house in San Francisco. There are usually 20-40 folks; we’ll cook dinner starting at 6:30, eat at 7pm.

(You’re invited! Join the Taco Tuesday Discord for weekly event announcements.)

What makes Taco Tuesday different from a typical house party?

• Regular
  • People make friends through repeated, unplanned interactions. A weekly recurring event provides a great default for this. After coming a few times, you start to remember the folks who you’ve met, what matters in their lives, how they are doing.
    • Most social events are one-off things, which means the energy and spark of meeting someone new, fades as you return to your daily life.
    • People often complain about it being hard to make friends outside of school — this is what school did well.
    • One thing religion gets really right: Sunday mass is a schelling point for making loose informal connections.
    • Helps solve the “baked goods theory of social friendship”
  • Taco Tuesday also provides a great excuse for seeing people again. If I bump into someone new who I really vibe with, before leaving I’ll try to invite them to Taco Tuesday.
    • Protip: people love being invited to things. Even if they can’t make it, they might reciprocate by inviting me to the next thing they’re doing.
  • For returning guests: Taco Tuesday is always at the same time (6:30pm on Tuesday) and at the same location, so it’s easy to remember
    • And planting a flag and putting it in the name of the event means that people can start remembering to block of Tuesdays evenings for this
    • Tuesdays are good because it’s basically a random weeknight, which rarely conflicts with That Big Party You Were Excited To Go To.
• Open
  • Everyone is welcome! There’s no invite list or inclusion criteria or attendance cap - you (yes you!) are welcome.
    • (this piece of social technology is stolen from Scott Alexander on ACX meetups ❤️)
  • The answer to “can I bring friends” is always “yes!”
    • This is a great way to introduce new blood to our little scene. We especially welcome 1) folks visiting from out of town, and 2) folks who have just moved to SF; these people have the most to gain from meeting others at an event!
  • One small bit of design that helps newcomers: everyone wears a nametag. Yeah, these often feel kind of clunky and a bit uncool, but they’re super helpful if this is your first time here and you’re meeting everyone for the first time.
• Low-friction
  • Event organizers often put a lot of effort into making their events “good”. Over a few days, one might send out invites, pick up groceries, find decorations or a theme, and cook for hours beforehand — all for a single party.
    • This means that events don’t actually happen as often as they should :(
    • And events are often one-off; after a cool party, an organizer might not organize something for another month
      • Agile software development saying: “if it hurts, do it more”. Aka: by running an event or process often, you learn where the pain points are, and are incentivized to improve on them
  • Key advantages to always doing tacos:
    • Always doing the same thing means that I conserve mental effort when shopping and cooking.
    • Tacos cook pretty quickly (just stir-fry a bunch of stuff) and lend themselves to parallelization
    • Tacos are self-serve, so you can pick out the ingredients and ratios of things that you like
  • I don’t bother crafting invites, I just broadcast in a few places (Discord, FB messenger group, Manifold market). People come via 1) memory, 2) reminders, 3) word-of-mouth-invites.
• Collaborative
  • Most hosts try to have everything neat and tidy for the guests. At Taco Tuesday, we put you to work.
  • The first 2-4 people to show up are press-ganged into helping with the kitchen: chopping up onions, bell peppers, avocados; stir-frying veggies and Beyond meat.
    • Cooking together is great for bonding — you have to solve the nontrivial logistics problem of preparing food for 30 people, as quickly as possible. It’s attacking a real problem, in the real world (Overcooked IRL!) A bunch of us are knowledge workers and cooking is a good change of pace.
  • Cleaning up afterwards: hosts often say things like “don’t worry about the dishes” or “we’ll take care of the cleanup”. I think this attitude of hosting-as-sacrifice is quite bad as it makes hosting so much less sustainable. So instead, we have guests help with loading the dishwasher, scrubbing pots and plans, putting things away, etc
  • We love having people bring snacks, desserts, and drinks to share as well! (Though we always make sure the main course ie tacos are taken care of)
  • People really enjoy pitching in — it imbues their Taco Tuesday experience with more meaning.
  • One more way it’s collaborative: Taco Tuesday regulars will offer to host! So Taco Tuesday moves to different houses, with different chefs, or with different events. Speaking of which:
• Eventful
  • A common failure mode of house parties: the only thing on offer is “talking to people”. (cf Every Bay Area House Party). I don’t know about you, but I can tolerate like 20 minutes of this before my eardrums are complaining at the noise level and I feel all talked out.
  • Taco Tuesday supports “talking to people” for you extraverts who actually like talking, but we also try to provide alternative options. Each week I try to change it up with some other theme or activity. Some of our more popular themes:
    • Book swap
      • Going around saying something about a book lets out a bit of your personality. Books are often things that people don’t talk that much about.
    • Night hike
      • Walking around the city at night in a group is a lot of fun. Hiking is great for conversations: better volume dynamics compared to being indoors, supports better mixing of conversational groups, provides novel stimuli from the environment as topics to discuss, something about walking stimulates the brain, etc.
      • There’s also a small thrill of “oh this is unusual/we shouldn’t be doing this”, esp if we’re sneaking in to a park after hours.
    • Karaoke
      • Choosing songs also has an element of “showing off a bit of your personality”. And singing together is super bonding, requires everyone to model how everyone else is acting and getting in sync, mind-melding
    • Puzzled Pint
      • Once again: forming small teams and tackling a challenge together, is a great experience
      • Puzzles are a form of intellectual play; working through one with a friend, pitching ideas, looking for the answer, and racing against other teams — chefs kiss
    • Board games
      • Oldie but goodie. Many people who don’t want to be talking all the time, absolutely love strategizing over Splendor or scheming as a Secret Hitler

Oral history

Taco Tuesday started 3 years ago, during the pandemic. My friends Karthik, Michael, and Dan were getting bored of shelter-in-place and illicitly invited me over for tacos. Breaking quarantine was so joyful, and I wanted to keep doing it — we settled into a pattern of seeing each other and making great tacos. So for a long time it was just 3-4 friends getting together, bringing ingredients, cooking together, catching up, watching anime.

Taco Tuesday has gone through 4 or 5 different “default houses” over its years. [TODO finish history]

Misc [TODO include]

• Prediction markets!
• Taco Tuesday got funded by Francisco San
• Taco Tuesday is responsible for two relationships forming! One of which through a Valentine’s Day singles mixer; another more organically. (Both couples have now separated though so caveat emptor).
• In the news!