While traveling through England on a solo trip last fall, the highlight of Vanessa Shintah's explorations wasn't all the famous places she visited, but the numerous strangers-turned-friends she encountered along the way.
After returning home to Spokane, Shintah realized how deeply those interactions impacted her, and how much she'd missed meeting new people during the pandemic years. She yearned to re-create the natural, sincere connections she'd made during her travels, this time with like-minded locals.
To her surprise, plenty of folks in the Inland Northwest are hungry for the same thing. After pitching her idea on social media to meet up with local strangers over a meal, a project Shintah dubbed Meet & Eat, more than 100 people responded.
"I wasn't really thinking that there would be that many people interested in doing this, plus, the interactions that I've had in Spokane... it wasn't necessarily like everybody was really excited about meeting a new person," Shintah says.
In late January, she coordinated the first meetup for Meet & Eat. Since then Shintah has met with about 15 different people at various restaurants in the Spokane area, writing about each experience on her website, radsmeetneat.blog. She's been to the Bad Seed in Hillyard with a woman named Ashley, tried Indigenous Eats near Gonzaga with Robyn, went to the Garland Pub & Grill with Isaac, and even organized group "field trips" with fellow Meet Eaters, as she's dubbed the project's alums, to Fluffy's Candy and Red Dragon.
For this story, too, I ask Shintah to treat our meeting as if I'm a regular Meet & Eat guest. When setting up these friend dates, she lets guests pick the location, asking them to consider their favorite restaurant, somewhere they've never been but have always wanted to try, or a brand new spot. If they can't decide, she'll turn to her "magic wheel" app to randomly pick. For our meetup last week, we landed on Wooden City downtown, which hosts happy hour from 4 to 5:30 pm daily.
For Shintah, the food enjoyed together is nearly as important as each new human connection, and she encourages sharing in order to sample a wider selection of the menu. And any Meet & Eat guests' dietary preferences, such as being vegan or alcohol-free, aren't seen as limiting, but enlightening.
At Wooden City — which I suggested because I hadn't been there in quite some time, yet covered for the Inlander when it opened back in summer 2020 — both I and our server recommend ordering the Hungarian stuffed peppers, a sausage and cheese-stuffed green pepper recipe by the restaurant's co-owner and chef Jon Green. In addition to the prosciutto toast with ricotta and chili jam, we also split an order of another popular item, the beet ravioli. Our server even let us in on a special secret: If you share this dish, it comes with one extra ravioli total for an even split.
As we dig into our appetizers, Shintah laughs as she says that she's usually the one to asking most of the questions, not the other way around. In true Meet & Eat tradition, though, she also blogs about our meetup from her perspective.
Beyond her desire to make authentic connections with folks from many different backgrounds, Shintah hopes Meet & Eat encourages more people to see past each other's differences — whether that's appearance, social background, sexual orientation, political ideology or anything else.
Originally from Oroville in north-central Washington, Shintah has lived in Spokane since moving back from Las Vegas in 2013 to be close to family as her nephew grows up. In more recent years, though, she says she's had several unwelcoming experiences as a half-Native, half-white person.
"I have all kinds of different stuff going on, you know, I'm tattooed, I'm pierced, I wear funky glasses, I dress differently. And I'm Brown and I'm tall and I'm big, and when my sister and my mom and I are together, we're really loud and we laugh a lot. We're a lot, I feel, for most people," she says. "But when we got here, I noticed that we kind of backed off from being that, and we really shelled up from like 2017 on until probably the past two years. It felt like we weren't accepted, or maybe tolerated. And so we just cut ourselves off" from the world.
Follow Meet & Eat
Website: radsmeetneat.blog
Facebook: Meet & Eat (public group)
During the heightened social tensions of the Trump presidency, and then COVID, Shintah and her family felt more isolated than ever. It wasn't until that solo trip to England last fall that her perspective on getting out and interacting with strangers totally changed.
"I met people every day, and it was super organic," Shintah recalls. "I've wanted that. I want to be social, and I want to interact with people and meet new people. It's exciting and fun, and here, I felt like I couldn't do that, by myself at least. But I can't travel all the time, so I was like 'What can I do?' I wanted to figure out a way to do that here, and not feel so trapped. And over there, food was a major factor that went into meeting everybody. And here, there's so many places around here that I've never been."
To find people who felt the same way, all Shintah had to do was be brave enough to simply ask.
"The people who opted in to try this out, they're not any of the people I've been worried about," she says. "I had just been so focused on how uncomfortable and off-putting the people were that I'd seen online the past two years. So it was a really personal thing, to get out and find these people and share. It's interesting, because a lot of the people that I've met so far have told me that this is something that they'd never do unless prompted. They've thought about wanting to go out and meet new people and, I guess, friend date, but it's just been too intimidating."
For Meet & Eat, Shintah tries to arrange a meetup at least once a week, and currently is working her way through that list of 100-plus initial respondents. She's created a Facebook group for the project, where past series' guests can connect with each other and share great dining discoveries around the area.
While her own Meet & Eat adventures are constrained by her personal schedule, Shintah hopes others — even those just discovering her project — feel empowered to set up their own dining adventures with a stranger.
"I've told them, any time that any of you want to hang out, I'm not the only one that can facilitate it," she says. "It's just really cool to see the interaction that's come out of that, like these people would never have met each other without me meeting them and introducing them. That's where I really want this to go, for people not to be scared anymore." ♦
