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We just like dinner.

The McGill Students' Culinary Society is a small group of students who decided, in 2016, that the cafeteria wasn't going to be enough. Twelve years later we are six hundred people, four officers, one very long table, and an open invitation to anyone hungry.

The Story

It started, like a lot of small things at McGill, in a kitchen that wasn't built for nine people.

A handful of undergrads pooled grocery money, dragged a folding banquet table down two flights of stairs, and ate together once a week. The first menu was an aggressively ambitious cassoulet that nobody quite finished. The second was pasta. Word got around.

Twelve years later the club has moved through several kitchens, picked up a few hundred members, and added workshops, market walks, guest chefs, and a recipes archive that now lives online. The folding table is gone but the rule it set is still here: the point is the meal we eat together, not the photograph of it.

We are not a culinary school and we are not a cooking show. Everyone is welcome, including the people who still think a saucepan is just a frying pan with taller sides.

The best conversations happen with your mouth full. We just built a society around that.
A founding line, found later on a napkin, 2016
What we believe

Four small
house rules.

Not a manifesto, just the things that keep coming up when we sit down and try to write out what this club is actually for.

01

Anyone can cook

You don't need to have grown up in a great kitchen, or any kitchen. If you can read and you can chop slowly, you can keep up.

Bring curiosity
02

Food is a passport

The fastest way to understand a place you've never been to is to cook something from it, badly, with someone who's from there laughing at you a little.

No borders night
03

The table is the point

Showing up matters more than what you brought. A perfect dish and an empty room is the wrong outcome.

Long-table policy
04

Pass the recipe on

Everything we learn becomes a shared note. The archive grows because someone takes the time to write down what their grandmother actually meant by "a bit of oil".

Open notebook
The Long Table

Twelve years
in seven lines.

  1. 2016

    Founded with eight people and a borrowed stovetop.

    The first meeting happens in a residence kitchen off McTavish. No one owns a chef's knife.

  2. 2018

    First long-table supper. Sixty plates, no one dies.

    The signature format lands: one room, one table, one menu, everybody eats together.

  3. 2020

    Lockdown pivot, the bake-along begins.

    Weekly recipes get sent to everyone's inbox. We cook the same thing on Sunday at 6, in our own kitchens, on a shared call.

  4. 2022

    Market mornings, oddly well-attended.

    Saturdays at Jean-Talon, 8am. Espresso is mandatory. We cook with whatever we drag home that afternoon.

  5. 2024

    The list crosses five hundred.

    The mailing list outgrows several spreadsheets in a row.

  6. 2026

    You're reading this.

    Six hundred names, four officers, and a kitchen with the lights on most nights of the week.

Pull up
a chair.

Open to all McGill students. First event is on us, you don't have to bring a thing.

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