Silent Dinner
A Conversation Piece
When I was in university, one of my writing teachers offhandedly mentioned that in Sweden, it was not uncommon to go out for coffee with a friend and to sit together without speaking. That idea lodged itself in my brain, and combined with my love of Bergman films, it sent me straight to Sweden the following summer. While I didn’t have any silent coffee dates in Stockholm during that trip, the concept of being together in silence has resonated strongly with me since. And it’s not just me either. The ability to sit in silence with someone is one of the commonly accepted delineations of friendship. It’s something that happens with our nearest and dearest. It’s something that could fall under, as social media lingo might have it, #relationshipgoals.
But why not test it with people we don’t yet know quite so well? As LM Montgomery (author of Anne of Green Gables) once wrote, “If you can sit in silence with a person for half an hour and yet be entirely comfortable, you and that person can be friends. If you cannot, friends you’ll never be and you need not waste time in trying.” So indeed why not test out the concept with strangers or potential friends?
In that spirit, and in the name of shaking things up, a friend and I hosted a silent dinner in Paris a few months ago. We each invited three guests and told them to come to a slightly experimental dinner party. We didn’t reveal the concept in advance. We simply left a sign on the door of my friend’s apartment indicating that once they entered, our guests would be required to remain silent until after the music stopped. I had prepared a playlist in advance.
Eventually, all eight of us gathered, most of us never having met before, and sans verbal introductions, we poured one another wine and had a dinner just as lively as any other. By the time the playlist ended, we were well acquainted. It felt funny to then have to go around the table and speak our names. The overwhelming accord was that the period of silence could’ve been longer. At the end of the evening, we agreed to host more silent dinners.
A few months later, I moved the silent dinner concept to a slightly different context. During the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona (the “world’s largest gathering for the mobile industry”), I was one of the curators who hosted and produced an event called the House of Beautiful Business, a special pop-up community for meaningful conversations about technology, humanity, leadership, and the future of work.
If you like this community story, grab a copy of this Rover recommended read:
As part of our programming, we arranged a “Silent Dinner: for Those Tired of Talking.” The concept was fairly simple; we wanted to have a dinner without conversation, a gathering without speech. We wanted to bring people together in a non-traditional way, and especially at a conference-style event, we hoped the “no talking, no pitching” idea would be refreshing. (You can read the account of one of my House of Beautiful Business co-curators Tim Leberecht here.)
We assembled a group of 18 people and arranged a meal. Guests knew it was meant to be a dinner without talking, but we had not communicated any other instructions to them. Just before the dinner’s start we laid out the rules: no speaking and no phone use until the playlist ended. Everything else (eye contact, gesturing, laughter) was acceptable. I had prepared a playlist of a predetermined length (1.5 hours) and used that as our timer, though our guests were not aware of that particular limit. When the music stopped, the talking could begin.
We entered the candlelit dining room, giddy and uncertain, and took random places around the long table. We had mostly not been introduced, and yet there we were, settling in next to one another, practical strangers, preparing to break bread without having uttered our names. We locked eyes, smiled, breathed in and out. We waited. The music, at first all without lyrics, played, and played with tempo. Time went on, but without looking at our phones (or our watches, for the few of us who still wear those), we couldn’t be sure how much or how fast.
The waiters, who had been instructed to play along with our silence (and graciously did so), entered to a round of spontaneous group applause, offering red or white wine through gestures. Each guest wordlessly chose his or her preferred beverage. Without voices, we saluted one another, clinking glasses. One guest even stood up and mimed a toast. We poured one another water. The meal continued. A first course. More wine (and more applause). A second course. We warmed up. Things were comfortable, friendly, jovial. Someone started a human wave, which we did clockwise and then counterclockwise at some point between courses.
We were having fun. And nonverbally communicating. We didn’t know one another’s names, jobs, accents, or hometowns, and yet, there we were having a lively, lovely dinner. To create a little midmeal movement, we staged a musical chairs situation, with a few of us getting up and switching seats. This way, we could wordlessly converse with guests we’d been too far from before. We joked around. Folded origami. Shared desserts. Sipped coffees.
And then the playlist ended. One of our guests had stepped out to the restroom. We wordlessly agreed to wait for her return. When she retook her seat, we looked around quietly at each other one last time. Someone had to interrupt the silence. “So,” I said. And the spell was broken. One hour and a half after we had entered the room, we went around the table and shared our names; our reasons for participating in the event; and how we felt about it.
The feelings were overwhelmingly positive. Some guests had had previous experiences with silent gatherings (mostly meditation-based ones), and all of us had enjoyed this alternative social experience. Overall, people had come open and curious and they left fulfilled and connected.
“Silent” is of course the wrong descriptor for the gathering. First of all, there was music, a prominent feature of the dinner. And second of all, there we were, in all of our human, animal noisiness. We breathed, sniffled, laughed, fidgeted, chewed, sneezed, clinked silverware and glasses. We shared a truly joyful, amiable experience.
Silence, as a form of communication, is golden.
