Hit Singles
By Roger Brooks, Jessica Voelker, and Steve Wiecking
Cruise Director (Foodie)
Dine-and-Date Divas
On the July evening when Andrea Bigelow walked into Bellevue’s Seastar Restaurant and Raw Bar, she wore Capri pants, a T-shirt, and a big old chip on her shoulder. A week earlier, the guy she’d been dating had dumped her without explanation, further souring her opinion of Seattle’s un-attached men. She was in no mood to mingle.
But the siren song of shellfish called. Like many singles who sign up for Space City Mixer’s Red Table Dinners—monthly events featuring special menus at area eateries—Bigelow was a major foodie, and she particularly loved seafood. She wasn’t about to miss a prepaid meal at the famously delicious Seastar.
Space City Mixer, a Seattle-based social club with over 20,000 members, organizes all kinds of events—beer-brewing classes, sunset sails, cooking demos. Co-owners Kim Savage and Andrea Martin vary venues as often as possible, encouraging Seattleites to explore their city as they make new friends. The Red Table Dinners, for example, always take place at a different restaurant: Il Bistro, Szmania’s, Palisade. Like most of Savage and Martin’s functions, they’re ingeniously devised to encourage -casual conversation: an equal number of each sex attend, and they sit man-woman-man-woman, at tables of eight. After each course they switch seats. “It’s a low-key approach,” says Savage, “but with a dating twist.”
Call them matchmakers, and Savage and Martin balk. “We are planners, we set the scene,” says Savage. But Bigelow tells a different story. As she walked toward the Seastar dining room that evening, she remembers feeling a tug on her arm. “There’s someone I want you to meet,” Savage whispered—the women knew each other from other Space City events—gesturing toward a dark-haired man. Bigelow sat next to him, and soon they were talking. His name was Christian Ward and, like Bigelow, he had arrived with few expectations beyond a great meal. But when another guest at their table bypassed all the fishy fare to order a (gasp!) steak, the two shared a secret look of seafood lovers’ horror.
After dinner, Bigelow asked Savage to encourage Ward to call her. He did, and two years later they were married.
Not every Red Table ends in a wedding, but Savage knows a night’s been successful when the lights have been dimmed and only the last crumbs of dessert remain on the table, yet the guests linger on, too caught up in conversation to notice the restaurant has closed around them.
Red Table Dinners, $55 includes a three-course meal plus gratuity and tax, www.spacecitymixer.com
Published: June 2008
