Many Walks of Life Dine at One Table Café

For a Friday evening in January, the community hall of Princeton’s Trinity Church felt like Easter Sunday.

Nearly 170 visitors gathered at the Episcopal parish for the inaugural dinner of Trinity Church’s One Table Café on January 21. Troubled youth from Camden sat down with senior citizens, scholars, and spiritualists.  They dined on cheese and biscuits, pan-roasted Scottish salmon, and sweet potato puree, all without spending a dime.

The concept behind One Table Café began as outreach. “We want to bring people together from different walks of life,” said coordinator Diane Somers, “and feed people who can’t ordinarily afford to have food in an environment like this.”

The café is designed to be a community restaurant that holds one free dinner a month for local visitors. The goal, according to Somers, is to provide a high-quality, healthy meal for individuals who don’t have the opportunity to frequent fine dining venues.

Guests included members from Trinity Church, Witherspoon Presbyterian Church, and First Baptist Church, but also visitors from the Princeton Community House and Senior Resource Center. The church invited company from Princeton/Trenton Crisis Ministry, which runs programs to feed the hungry and homeless, and the Urban Promise youth group from Camden, which gives impoverished, struggling youth a supportive educational environment.

Friday’s candlelit, table-clothed dinner featured a multi-course meal prepared by the event’s restaurant sponsor of the night, Mediterra. In the spirit of the event, half a dozen chefs from the local restaurant volunteered their time. The wait staff was also comprised of community volunteers.

In order to fund the One Table Café, the church has been searching for private sponsors, including local restaurants, real estate groups, and individual donors.

The event also featured inaugural speaker Dr. Cornel West, the renowned Princeton University professor of religion and African American studies. West flew out from Los Angeles, Calif., where he appeared on the Craig Ferguson show, to speak to One Table Café’s guests and commemorate the Trinity Church’s outreach efforts.

“This is the human community at its best,” West said. “It’s all about love and compassion trying to generate bonds of trust.” 

Reverend Paul Jeanes III, Trinity Church’s new rector, introduced West to the stage and also explained the origins of the name and goals of One Table Café. The notion of “One Table” is a spiritual concept, deriving from the idea of religious community and acceptance in Christian faith.

“As humans, we can eat just to survive, but that’s not what we want to do,” said Reverend Jeanes. By eating together at one metaphorical table, he said, people begin to form relationships and build a diverse community.

“When we break bread together at a table,” he said, “we begin to thrive.”

Somers said that Reverend Jeanes challenged Trinity to extend its hand to members outside the church’s community. The project became One Table Café.

“To say that this is an outreach effort is somewhat one-dimensional,” said Reverend Jeanes, “because we think of outreach as this group of folks doing something for this [other] group.” He likened it instead to a community-building project, bringing together people from various racial, religious and social backgrounds, regardless of age, education or income.

West praised Reverend Jeanes’ vision of community and service. Standing away from the pulpit with nothing but a microphone in his hand, West gave an impassioned and humorous sermon-like appraisal of local and national issues of culture and faith. He compared the One Table Café’s mission to the activities of Jesus Christ.

“Free healing and common eating. That’s subversive,” he said, explaining how uncommon it was in the first century for anyone to offer service without payment. “Can you imagine being healed and not having to pay a penny? That’s better than Obama’s healthcare plan.”

The next One Table Café dinner is scheduled for February 18 at Princeton Trinity Church on 33 Mercer Street. Piccolo Trattoria of Pennington will be sponsoring the meal.

About the Author

Vivienne Chen

Vivienne Chen is a student at Princeton University majoring in English. She recently moved to Princeton from Pleasanton, California.