The idea behind Gather

Some of the best hours of my life were spent at a dinner table in rural Indiana.

My dad usually cooked, sometimes my mom. As my sister and I got older, we cooked too. Carrying the food out was the thing that pulled everyone else into the room, and then nobody left. We talked about the day, about ideas we'd had, about nothing in particular. The plates were empty long before we were.

Then I left Indiana, and I found flavors that corn and potatoes had never prepared me for. Smoked paprika. Vietnamese cinnamon. The first time a Sichuan peppercorn buzzed my tongue numb I put my chopsticks down to ask what that was (mala, or the numbing half of it). None of it replaced anything. It just gave the table more to talk about.

Bringing food to a table is an act of love. That is why Gather exists, and it is the one part of this we are never going to change.