Rebecca HEslin Haller

An Ode to The Men’s Cookbook Club

Four years ago, on a snowy New Year’s Eve in rural Pennsylvania at the wedding of dear friends, an idea was born over vodka sodas and whiskeys on the rocks: The Men’s Cookbook Club.

The concept, simple. The reality, far more elaborate.

Three longtime, D.C.-based friends—my husband Matt Haller, Bennett Richardson and Ali Tulbah—choose a cookbook and whip up a fancy feast for their partners—myself, Lindsey Richardson and Alana Nolan. Like a favorite book club, but with gourmet cuisine in addition to talk of the tome.

These dinner parties don’t just come together out of nowhere (not that I’d know, I don’t cook). The first step in The Men’s Cookbook Club is to study the cookbook. As a bonafide bibliophile and avid reader, I’ll be the first to admit I never really gave cookbooks their due until The Men’s Cookbook Club came to be. I’d often poke fun at my husband for flipping through cookbooks, studying them, reading them like an addictive novel while sitting on the couch or on an airplane. I’ve since come to appreciate the obvious: True chefs don’t rely on the index to know what’s inside. They start at page one. (Cookbook readers: They’re just like us!)

The camaraderie doesn’t start and stop in the kitchen. There’s the meal planning: After selecting and studying the cookbook—typically a newer one to hit the shelves or one from a buzzy chef—the men get on a conference call, FaceTime or, naturally, sit down for a meal to plan the menu. The first meeting of The Men’s Cookbook Club set many precedents which are still followed like protocols whenever possible, including grocery shopping, sometimes at a local farmer’s market, together as a group, book in tote. A potluck dinner, this is anything but.

The day of the dinner party, sometimes the night before, Matt, Bennett and Ali take to their individual kitchens to do as much prep and advance work as possible. While I’m not privy to the contents of The Men’s Cookbook Club text group (only the one of the larger group of the three couples), I can tell you there’s often a lot of laughter that comes out of the kitchen during meal prep time. My understanding is the guys provide one another with status updates and occasional play-by-plays of the process. It’s like the Butterball Hotline, but open year round. Lindsey and I once coined the term “fexting,” as in sexting but with food pictures, to describe the fellas’ texting habits. Rarely does an elaborate home-cooked meal go by without the other club members being made aware. They may be cooking alone, but they’re always doing so together.

The first meeting of The Men’s Cookbook Club took place in spring of 2018. Matt and I played host (which means, technically, I did lift a finger, but honestly, barely). I still remember the air of excitement surrounding that day. It was warm out, so, in what would prove to be good practice for a pandemic coming down the pike in a few years, we dined alfresco. As the couples arrived, the men went into the kitchen to get to work finalizing their dishes. Ali, our resident mixologist, concocted his take on a refreshing Paper Plane cocktail, served over a big ice cube and garnished with a slice of lime. We all toasted over the cookbook, Alison Roman’s Dining In—another harbinger of what was to come had we fast-forwarded to 2020—calling the inaugural Men’s Cookbook Club to order.

It’s easy to go back and see exactly what was cooked up at that first meeting of The Men’s Cookbook Club because—and quite possibly my favorite part of the Club—the men each sign the others’ books with the recipes they contributed. And thank goodness, because upon unscientific review, my husband has since cooked everything else in this book and memories involving taste buds can sometimes get mixed up. (I have to wash my hands every time I handle this particular cookbook, however, as it’s splattered with oil and grease and god knows what else. This, I’m told, as someone who treats her own books a bit too preciously, is the sign of a well-loved book.)

The menu of the inaugural Men’s Cookbook Club meeting included: Burrata with Tangerines, Shallots and Watercress; Grilled Squid with Spicy, Garlicky White Beans and Vinegared Tomatoes; Grilled Branzino with Lemons All of the Ways. An off-menu homemade pizza was grilled in a cast-iron pan at the last minute and served just for fun. Dessert was a Lemon Shaker Tart. 

It goes without saying the best part (at least as a mere diner, although I’m confident all would agree) is sitting down together to enjoy the meal. If the kitchen is the heart of the house, the dining table is its soul. And The Men’s Cookbook Club nourishes both. The dishes, of course, are the true guests of honor. More than excuses to eat incredible food and sip fancy cocktails, meetings of The Men’s Cookbook are, at least to me, meals with meaning. When’s the last time you took the time to make something alongside your friends? Not for them, with them. Don’t get me wrong, traditional dinner parties are a delight in their own right. Potlucks, too, have their place. But what The Men’s Cookbook Club brings to the table is a sense of connection that runs deeper than plates piled high of delicious food. There’s a mindfulness, a constant sense of presence, woven into these meals. There’s a degree of care, of community.

It’s easy to talk about surface subjects over dinner and dive into the food as soon as it’s served. It’s a whole other experience to savor each bite while learning what went into making it. The ingredients, the steps. I, for one, relish the opportunity to hear the chefs discuss each dish in detail, like putting tangible lessons learned on a plate and saying, “here, have some more.” A good sign is often the silence blanketing the table upon first bites. But the silence never lasts long at these meals. We discuss the dishes and the cookbook’s authors, of course (Alison Roman, fun and never overcomplicated; Samin Nosrat, unpretentious and delicious; Sean Brock, delicious, but challenging for the sake of being challenging; Yotam Ottolenghi, surprisingly simple but exploding with flavor). But we dish about more than sides and entrées, too. One topic that doesn’t get discussed often, if at all, is work, which is really saying something for a dinner table in Washington, D.C. There’s no such spoken rule prohibiting the subject, but I believe it speaks more to the depth of the group, to our individual desires to collectively commune over conversations of consequence with good friends. We talk about politics and what’s going on in the world. We talk about our parents getting older. We talk about travel. We talk about grief. A recent topic included the controversial ingredient MSG and the xenophobic marketing that gave it a bad wrap, and what something like that means for and in kitchens around the world. I always walk away from these meals having learned something, in addition to being sore from laughter, both of which tend to be my personal metrics for time well spent.

Matt turned 40 a couple weeks after the pandemic brought the world to its knees in 2020. A few days earlier we’d (obviously) had to cancel a previously planned Cookbook Club meeting, an early pandemic heartbreak. On a whim I reached out to Alison Roman, the author behind our first Cookbook Club meeting, to see if she’d be game to surprise Matt over Zoom along with The Men’s Cookbook Club and a few other dear friends, including the couple whose wedding inspired the group in the first place. Far from her target demographic, and likely in spite of this, alongside a dash of early pandemic boredom, she responded with a resounding hell yes. She graciously spent more than an hour with us talking about life and food. The next day the text group was a nonstop stream of comments about how nice it was to get together, even virtually; how normal it felt after two weeks of anything but. “Strangely, I woke up this morning and for a moment had a dim feeling that everyone had been over to the house last night,” Ali texted the group. “Which right now is about the best gift anyone could ask for.” 

Many months later, the group got together for the first pandemic-era meeting of The Men’s Cookbook Club, all of our first real group gatherings since COVID-19 made its appearance. It was so nice to be back together around the table, albeit outside and with a bit more distance than we were accustomed to, with individual servings of everything from appetizer plates to hand sanitizer. Mostly it felt good to be back in communion with one another. “Y’all: that was SUCH A PLEASURE getting together and seeing all of you,” Alana texted the group the next morning. We did it again the following month. After dinner we watched then-President-elect Biden’s historic victory speech on TV as a family, the family we’ve become, one often with differing opinions but with a shared love of breaking bread.

These meals bring us together, like ingredients in a recipe. The company keeps us coming back for more. 

All this, from a cookbook.

Rebecca Haller is a writer, researcher and recovering journalist based in DC. By heart she’s a storyteller and a seeker with a chronic case of wanderlust and a penchant for passport stamps. She writes Lies I’veTold My Therapist and conducts qualitative research for clients through Haller Strategies. Leveraging design-thinking techniques and 15+ years of media and newsroom experience including at USA Today and POLITICO, she helps brands and organizations uncover consumer insights and develop customer-centric strategies.