Eating at a Complete Stranger's Dinner Party on Holiday Is Great

You're supposed to try new things when you're in foreign countries. Stomach-stripping local spirits, dirty-looking hot locals who look like they'd marry 55-year-old women from Lanarkshire for a visa and end up in Take A Break, and, at least once, buy a pair of tie-dyed harem trousers from a market. So, when in Lisbon on my holidays last week, I tried having lunch with total strangers.

EatWith.com is a new-ish venture that is supposed to feel like going over to a friend's house for dinner, only, the house is abroad and full of complete strangers. It's pretty much an outlet for people who get bored of eating in restaurants with pictures of the food on sticky laminate menus when they're holiday.

In the year since it launched, EatWith has become huge in Barcelona—there are 172 events in the city right now, everything from sushi to tapas to Thai—and not-so-big in Sao Paulo, where there are only eight events (although one of those will almost certainly involve someone teaching you how to cook a guinea pig, Peruvian-style). Jerusalem is optimistically active on the site, as is Tel Aviv (where it started), but Australia only has three hosts in the entire country. Aw.

The meals tend to fall into two categories—ones where your hosts teach you something (sushi-making, market tours, the aforementioned guinea pig BBQ) or just the straight up "come over to mine for dinner" (and pay for it via PayPal). Lisbon, weirdly, doesn't actually feature much Portuguese food—there was pizza, Brazilian and "world food" on offer, so I choose to eat with Lilian and To-Pe, who promised to cook me something traditional.

Let's get one thing straight here—I'm not the kind of person who chooses to eat with strangers. I've been known to eat lunch alone in an empty meeting room if the work experience girl decides that 1PM is the exact moment to quiz me on how I got into journalism. Incidentally, it was by not interrupting other people's ten minute window they're using to ram a warm Pret sandwich into their face while soullessly scrolling through ASOS.

But there was a lot about EatWith that appealed to me. Namely, the chance to ask people who actually lived in Lisbon what it's like to, er, live in Lisbon. An opportunity to judge other people's table manners, to pretend I'm in a weird Portuguese version of Come Dine With Me without having to do that annoying cooking-for-other-people thing. The fact that this event was happening four minutes walk from where I was staying was a contributing factor, too. Mainly, though, it was about the food. The host's page promised fat sardines, glossy black olives, and tomatoes at least four times the size of the ones we have in the UK. What can I say? I'm greedy.

When I actually arrived in Lisbon, though, I was worried. What in god's name was I doing? I was going over to a stranger's house. Someone I'd met on the internet. In fact, someone I actually approached over the internet and paid. This was the same week as The Canterbury Cannibal was in court.

Was my host going to behead me with a meat cleaver, cover my face in olive oil and herbs, then roast it? Had I paid someone €25 to chop me up with an axe? And would my embarrassed parents have to explain to The Sun that I'd actually actively pursued these people? I hope they'd kept my approved missing persons photos out, ready to hand out to the media. A colleague emailed with the helpful comment, "You probably won't be just murdered. If it's a couple, it's probably a SEX murder."

I pictured turning up at the meal, my potential sex murderers realising I'd used an old photo on my EatWith profile, and their poor faces dropping with disappointment. But, y'know, you've got to take chances in life. What else was I going to do on a quiet Sunday afternoon in a hot-as-fuck Catholic country?

It started well. I got the tour of Liliana and To-Pe's house that I would have taken myself on anyway, in secret, while pretending to use the loo. Some of the other EatWith guests had already arrived, so I felt like they had already sucked up some of the awkwardness and I could just stare at the donkey dick-like chorizo sitting on the barbeque and nod happily. Everyone spoke English. I felt pretty confident that nobody wanted to try and kill me, so tried a white port sangria. Okay, I had two. They were pretty amazing.

I rammed tuna pate and lupini beans down my throat and, because I was with strangers, everyone was too polite to point out you don't eat the outside of lupini beans. In fact, that was the best part about eating with people you don't know—no one can say that you're fucking up de-boning a sardine, or cuntily point out that you're drinking too fast, or tell you not to eat five baked potatoes in a row and suggest you eat some salad. Because they don't give a shit. In two hours, they're never, ever going to see you again, so you can eat like a big, sweating Henry VIII at an orgy-banquet. Who cares?

Even my lactose intolerance (yeah, not great in a country famous for its custard tarts) was even catered for. My darling hosts had cooked me an apple crumble, which may not have been what the other guests—a British guy who looked like he should play on my sister's Ultimate Frisbee team, two Barcelona-based men who could have been a couple but also could have been super-best friends who lived and holidayed together, and a girl from New York who actually knew some of my friends from South London—wanted to eat in 31 degree heat. Sorry not sorry.

It was all only a bit awkward, too. After three bottles of wine, it turns out pretty much everyone can find common ground. Even if you are repeating the same thing you tell your relatives at Christmas about what you do for a living and talking about how much you hate food shopping. Did you know that in Spain you can just leave your basket in the queue and that saves your place at the till? I did not. I do now.

Come the end, there was still that weird, end-of-meal moment where you don't just want to get up and be, like, "BYE THEN", but you also don't want to hang around like the last ket-head at a party. In the end, though, I just wanted to leave and lie down to sleep off the three-course meal I had just drowned in enough Vinho Verde (yeah, green wine, who knew?) to drown the whole of Portugal.

I'd recommend anyone who's going on holiday soon to seek out an EatWith meal. You don't have to help with the washing up. You don't have to half-arsed-ly organise a meal in return, and, best of all, you don't have to pretend you're going to keep in contact. It's perfect.