Secret dinners bring strangers together

Events allow participants to sign up without knowing details. ELENI PHILIPPOU treks out to Vouni to share a taste of the island and conversation with a bunch of international strangers

Eating is very much part of the Cyprus psyche, and a new venture is taking it to a new level by offering curated dining experiences around the country. Hush-Hush Dinners stages secret, out-of-the-box dining events.

In August last year, founder Anya Masalova set out to bring people back together after many of us had eaten alone during Covid. “I was sitting on my balcony eating takeaway souvlakia and I had this realisation that I’ve been eating alone quite a lot because I’ve been moving countries. I was really tired of eating alone, and I really would love to socialise. But I didn’t want to complain about it, I wanted to find a creative way to solve it. So, I just decided to do a gathering at my house to kind of celebrate that.”

That first dinner with friends was the beginning of Hush-Hush, which back in September of 2021 didn’t even have a name. Anya shared with a chef friend the idea of creating pop-up dinner events to connect strangers and the first test-drive dinner took flesh and bone in October. But it wasn’t until March 2022 that the next event took place, with a website, logo, name and brand to support it.

Since then, she has been organising these pop-up experiences every few months, each time at a new location with a different private chef. Certainly, the surprise element is what most find exciting as before going guests know very little. The location of the dinner is a secret, only revealed 48 hours before the event and still, the menu and other dinner guests remain unknown.

All I knew about the dinner I joined this September was that it was going to be in a village near Limassol. An email revealed the schoolyard of Vouni would be the setting for our afternoon dinner and an Instagram post that South-African chef Eve of Greek descent would be cooking for us.

We were greeted with unlimited free wine, included in the early-bird €50 or €75 ticket, to accompany our three-course dinner. We sipped while taking in the mountain views and the well-kept limestone school building. I knew no one except the friend I brought along with me and up until that point, it seemed that we were the only non-Russian, non-Limassol guests there. Anya, a Russian-Ukrainian herself, hopes the events will gather people of all nationalities and walks of life.

“The locals that have come to the events so far, I would say they are people who live abroad, studied abroad and worked abroad. And on the other side,” she added, “there are also foreigners like me who’ve been here for some time and they want to understand Cyprus more and its people.”

I probably would not have had the chance to meet the guests I shared my meal with if not for Hush Hush. While waiting for our food, which took some time to arrive because we were the large dinner organised so far, we shared details of our lives, our relationship with Cyprus and anecdotes. When chit-chat ran dry, we would pick some of the conversation cards spread around the table and answer them to reignite discussion. To some degree it worked, though when the food arrived it was a welcome interruption.

For starters, we were served two pieces of koupepia with diced vegetables on a bed of yoghurt. Not the most exhilarating choice for a Cypriot who grew up eating grandma’s gemista, yet the foreigners present found them a delight, and they did in fact taste great. Mains was steak with potato and vegetable puree and a pasta dish for vegetarians. For dessert, we were ushered into a classroom of the school to taste cheesecake and halva. The change of location for the last course was intentional to mix guests up once again and allow us to mingle with someone sitting at the other end of the table. Card games around the room helped us ease into conversation once again.

Up until now, Hush-Hush Dinners have taken place around Limassol and Paphos, but Anya hopes to take her events to more locations in Nicosia, Larnaca and even more rural areas. Though still in their early days, Anya’s vision for Hush Hush Dinners and the charming experience it offers makes it a promising concept worth trying out. Follow them online to find out what is coming next.

www.hush-hushdinners.com, Instagram @hush.hush.dinners