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Club Cambio – the Dating Dinner Party

Club Cambio

As you can imagine, here at Crummbs HQ we LOVE a dinner party. So imagine our excitement when we got chatting to Lizzie, founder of Club Cambio aka, The Dating Dinner Party. We thought it would appeal to a few of our gorgeous foodie followers too, so here’s the lowdown if you’re single and ready to mingle.

For anyone that isn’t familiar with Club Cambio, give us the lowdown. How did it come about?

The premise of Club Cambio is that it’s a dating dinner party for London dwellers in their mid-twenties to early thirties. Each event offers a changing cuisine, guest list & location. Think if Airbnb did single supper clubs. The host puts on the night and 8-14 single people get the chance to date offline.

I guess it came about from the collision of two things. Firstly, the fact that dating nowadays is really hard, no one speaks in real life and everyone has the same curated pictures and answers on the apps. Chatting to potential prospects online feels like life admin, and when you do eventually get to a date, more often than not, within 5 minutes you know there’s no vibe. I wanted the raw,  spontaneous stories of my parent’s generation, and I knew my friends wanted them too.

Secondly, we used to host these pretty ridiculous dinner parties at our flat where we’d invite our own dates (BYOD), usually boyfriends or friends but there’d always be endless hilarious stories to recount the next day. I loved hosting them but wanted to take it one step further, where everyone gets the chance to date each other, not just their own plus one, to tackle the ‘there’s no vibe with this one person’ problem and to foster a really fun environment based around excellent food and drink.

Being a big believer in side projects, a lover of hosting and an unashamed romantic, I just thought I’d give it a try. So, I wrote some copy for an event I’d have liked to attend, sent it to a few trusted friends and within a couple of hours, I had about 100 email addresses of people wanting to be in the loop. It was exciting, this had legs.

 

Club Cambio FounderWhat’s your background, do you work in the dating or food sphere?

My full time job is at Real Handful, a healthier snacks start-up where I look after everything to do with marketing and brand. Most of the time, it’s just me and the two co-founders, so I get good exposure to the highs and lows of entrepreneurship everyday.

 

Do you have any nightmare date stories you care to share?

Not real nightmares, but I have a fair few good stories.  The most notable one was when I’d previously told a guy that I liked Shia LeBeouf, I think it was a passing comment amongst the million other things we’d been chatting about in the week leading up to our date. When we did come to meet about 45 minutes into some pretty awkward chat, he proceeds to tell me he has something for me and produces a hand-crafted print out complete with pictures of Shia LeBeouf eating things – ‘level one entry to the Shia club’. It was quite sweet but I was pretty taken aback. Suffice to say, I did not make it to level two.

 

What would be on your dream dinner party menu?

Calamari starter with rich aioli, fresh linguine with huge king prawns, a side of rocket and crusty olive bread and for dessert my Grandad’s apple crumble with raspberry jam and a side of Ben and Jerry’s chocolate fudge brownie.

I think I think about this menu most days.

 

Is there any food that would instantly turn you off someone?

I’m half Italian, I think food being a repellent is basically impossible for me.

 

What’s in the pipeline for Club Cambio?

Our Christmas event and last blowout of 2019 is in a few weeks, so currently the immediate pipeline project is finding some sustainable Christmas crackers. One of the exciting parts about Club Cambio is that the table decorations are all upcycled to keep our events low impact. Further down the line, we have lots of plans particularly around diversification, but with a steep learning curve ahead, I’m keen to move intentionally and nail our core offering first.

Keep up to date with Club Cambio on Instagram.

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