Happy Friday {{first_name | Reader}},

Let me ask you something honest.

When was the last time you sat around a table with people you care about, no one checking their phone, no background scroll, just proper conversation, proper laughter, proper food? Not a family obligation. Not a work thing. Just people, choosing to be together, fully present.

For most of us, the answer takes a moment to find. And I think that pause says everything.

We are living through a strange contradiction. We have never been more "connected." We are in more WhatsApp groups than we can manage. We get notifications from people we last spoke to in 2019. We have LinkedIn connections in the hundreds and Instagram followers we couldn't name if you paid us. And yet, loneliness in the UK is at levels that public health researchers describe as a quiet epidemic. The Office for National Statistics found that more than 3.3 million adults in England are often or always lonely. Separate research from the Campaign to End Loneliness found that loneliness is as harmful to health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. We are surrounded by noise and starving for contact.

I don't think we're bad people. I think we've been handed systems that are very good at simulating connection while quietly replacing it.

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Think about how a normal week goes now. You wake up and within minutes you're inside a screen. News. Weather. WhatsApp. Email. Before you've eaten breakfast you've consumed more content than a person in 1990 would have encountered in a week, and almost none of it required you to look another human being in the eye.

Then AI arrived and turned the volume up further. Now we're not just consuming content, we're consuming content that was generated in seconds, often without a human hand involved at all. Scroll long enough and you can spend an entire evening reading, watching, reacting, forwarding, and replying, and realise at the end of it that you haven't actually spoken to anyone. Not really spoken. Not the kind of speaking where someone sees your face change when you say something that matters.

The WhatsApp groups have their own particular texture. They're useful, I'm not dismissing them. But there's a version of community that exists in those groups that gives us the feeling of belonging without doing the work of it. Someone shares a funny video. Forty people send a laughing emoji. Nobody has moved closer to anyone.

I've thought about this a lot, because Hertstown is fundamentally a community project. I started it because I believed, and still believe, that the people living in this county are more interesting, more generous, and more worth knowing than the algorithm ever shows them. But a newsletter, even a good one, is still words on a screen. I've always known that the real work of community happens in person.

The research on what regular face-to-face social contact does to us is not subtle. Harvard's 80-year study on adult development, one of the longest running studies of human wellbeing ever conducted, found that the quality of our relationships is the single strongest predictor of how long we live and how happy we are. Not our income. Not our career success. Our relationships. The people who stayed socially connected stayed healthier into old age. The people who became isolated saw faster cognitive decline and shorter lives.

Shared meals sit at the centre of this. Eating together is one of the oldest human bonding mechanisms we have. It is woven into every culture on earth. The word "companion" comes from the Latin "com" (with) and "panis" (bread). A companion, literally, is someone you break bread with. Shared meals lower cortisol, increase oxytocin, build trust, and create the kind of repeated positive contact that turns acquaintances into actual friends. Robin Dunbar, the Oxford anthropologist who famously mapped the limits of human social networks, found in his research on social eating that people who eat together regularly report higher levels of belonging and life satisfaction than those who don't.

This is not soft wellness content. This is physics. Humans are built for this.

And here's the thing. People know it. Somewhere underneath the scrolling and the group chats and the AI-generated noise, people are remembering what they're missing. The data is starting to show it.

OpenTable, which processes hundreds of millions of restaurant reservations globally, released its 2026 dining trends report and the headline finding is striking. Group dining for parties of six or more is up 11 percent year-on-year in the United States, and up 5 percent in the United Kingdom. Thirty-six percent of Brits say they want more group and private dining options in 2026. In Canada, a similar hospitality report found group bookings for six-plus are up 15 percent this year compared with last, with birthdays and social celebrations driving the majority of reservations. Across hospitality and event industry commentary, the consistent theme of 2026 is that people are moving back toward smaller, more intentional in-person gatherings.

People are voting with their diaries. They are organising around a table rather than around a screen. They are remembering, or rediscovering, that shared experiences are irreplaceable.

This is not a restaurant trend. This is a human correction.

Communities have always found ways to resist isolation. The response just tends to look different depending on the context.

Walking groups have exploded in popularity across the UK since the pandemic, particularly in suburban and rural areas where social infrastructure outside the pub had quietly collapsed. Running clubs like Parkrun have created weekly rituals that are as much about community as they are about fitness. Civic organisations like the Women's Institute, which many people still associate with a previous generation, are seeing younger membership. Book clubs, craft groups, volunteering networks, neighbourhood forums, all of them are growing because people are actively seeking environments where the transaction is simply being together.

And group dining sits at the natural end of most of these activities. You train together, you walk together, you volunteer together, and then you eat together. The table is where the conversation stops being structured and starts being real. It's where you find out that the woman you've been nodding to at Parkrun for three months has a completely fascinating career history, or that the bloke from your cycling group has been through something similar to what you're going through now. The meal is the reward, but it's also the work.

This is where I want to get personal with you for a moment.

Earlier this year, Hertstown Dinners launched as our attempt to put some of this into practice. We started collaborating with local restaurants to bring residents together at themed events, deliberately mixing people from across the county who might never otherwise meet. The format was simple. A shared table, a venue willing to host us, a reason to show up that wasn't a networking event or a fundraiser. Just people, eating together, with intention.

The response was warmer than I honestly expected. We have recently partnered with one brilliant local venue, Fishy Delishy in Cheshunt, who has been an incredible host and genuinely shares the vision of bringing residents together around a table. If you haven't been to Fishy Delishy Restaurant, they are worth knowing about beyond the dinners themselves. Go and support them. They are exactly the kind of independent local business that make Hertfordshire worth living in.

But one venue, however good, only serves part of the county. Hertfordshire is big. Someone in Berkhamsted or Stevenage or Welwyn or Hitchin shouldn't have to travel to Cheshunt to find a community dining experience near them. Every community deserves to know what's on their doorstep.

And then something else started happening that made me realise the need runs even deeper than I thought.

WhatsApp group admins, people who run local residents' groups, neighbourhood chats, community networks across Hertfordshire, started reaching out to ask whether we could help them find venues with group reservation facilities or group menus. They had groups of 15, 20, 30 people who wanted to meet in person and didn't know where to go. They needed a private dining room, or a venue that could handle a group menu, or a pub with enough flexible space to accommodate a gathering that size.

And I realised we didn't have a good answer. Because no one had built the map yet.

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There is no single place in Hertfordshire where you can go and find a curated list of restaurants, hotels, pubs, and venues that have proper group booking facilities. Private dining rooms. Group menus. The capacity and the willingness to host a gathering of people who want to do something together. It doesn't exist. And with summer approaching, with people starting to plan outdoor activities, charity walks, sports days, community events, birthday celebrations, and all the rest of it, that gap becomes very visible very quickly.

Think about how many groups are currently sitting in a WhatsApp chat right now, debating where to go for the summer outing. Where the after-walk meal should happen. Where to hold the leaving do. Where to take the team. Where to celebrate the anniversary. Those conversations happen every week and they often dissolve because nobody can find the right venue quickly enough. The group chat stays a group chat. The meal never happens. The moment passes.

I want to change that for Hertfordshire. I want to build the list.

Here's what I'm asking.

I want to create a proper directory of venues across Hertfordshire. Restaurants, pubs, hotels, private members spaces, anywhere with genuine group booking and private or semi-private dining facilities. Not a generic directory scraped from Google. A curated, community-built list that residents actually trust, because residents helped build it. Organised by area, so that every community in this county can find something near them.

With summer approaching, the timing feels right. People are more willing to get out, to plan, to book. The appetite is there nationally. I see it locally every time Hertstown Dinners puts something together. The venues that are ready for this moment deserve to be found. The groups that want to gather deserve somewhere good to go.

So here is the ask. If you know a venue in Hertfordshire that handles group bookings well, that has a private dining room, a flexible space, a group menu, a host who makes a party of 15 feel genuinely welcome rather than like an inconvenience, I want to hear about it. Hit reply and tell me the name, the location, and what you loved about the experience. Whether it was a birthday dinner, a work celebration, a community gathering, a family reunion. Whatever brought you there and made it worth going back.

I will compile every response, reach out to the venues directly, and publish a proper recommended list in a future edition. When people start booking their summer events in the coming weeks, I want them to have somewhere in Hertfordshire to look first, and I want that somewhere to have been built by this community, for this community.

Because here's what I keep coming back to. The algorithm is not going to fix loneliness. The group chat is not going to replace the table. But a really good meal, with people you actually know or are about to get to know, in a venue that was ready for you? That's a start. A genuinely good start.

Let's make more of those happen this summer.

Reply to this email with your recommendation. Tell me the venue, the area, and what made the group experience memorable. And if you haven't been to a Hertstown Dinner yet, keep an eye on the next edition. We're planning something good.

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Have a fab day!

Cheers,
Editor-in-chief | Emeka Ogbonnaya

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