As a food writer, I’ve been to a lot of dinners—fancy galas, Michelin-starred tasting menus with pristine presentations, hole-in-the-wall spots where flavorful piles of food are packed in foam containers. None of them compare to the dinners hosted by Marlon Hall, but at his dinners, it’s not really about the food. It’s about the guests.
The night before his scheduled Ecotone dinner at Houston’s Lymbar, I opened an email with instructions. I was advised to bring a pocket-sized “artifact,” something that told a story about my family or my history, and wear an outfit I’d want to be remembered by.
The next night, I headed to the restaurant, dressed in bright orange, carrying a love letter my grandmother had written my grandfather while he was away in the Army. While we mingled over cocktails, Hall directed guests to a table covered in slips of paper, each printed with a quote. “Choose the quote that chooses you,” he told us, and then we’d find the other person with the same one.
Maya Angelou’s “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you” drew me to a Vietnamese American woman wearing an elegant top her mother had sewn for her. In her hand was a book her grandfather had started decades ago, one that every member of the family was meant to add a chapter to. Hers was the only chapter still missing.
Artist and cultural anthropologist Marlon Hall has hosted well over 300 dinners around the world, connecting strangers over who they are, not what they do.
A dinner held at Lucille’s in 2022.
From there, the night only got more magical. Hall pointed to another Angelou line: that no one walks into a room alone—our ancestors walk in with us, encouraging us. I pictured my grandparents in a cloud above me, striking up a conversation with the person next to me. I think they’d have been proud of the company.
As the dishes came out, we talked through our quotes—why they spoke to us, which word had landed hardest. For both of us, it was “untold.” Then came the artifacts. Around the table, I heard strangers’ stories: beautifully arranged flowers that stood for femininity, power, and connection; a small trinket carried by a Mexican woman who had lived undocumented and never quite felt welcome here. One woman unearthed a pin she’d made as a child, a proud declaration of her certainty in God—only to find herself, as an adult, protesting at Catholic churches that offered little empathy for immigrants. Moments later, she pressed a mug representing the anti-bullying work she did into the hands of the woman who’d once felt unwelcome. Somewhere in the middle, I became overwhelmed, in the best way, and the tears started to flow. I was partly in awe of how quickly I’d come to know strangers by skipping the common pleasantries and empty platitudes and diving deep into the parts of ourselves we don’t usually hand over to people we’ve just met; then, partly out of a strange grief that more of my dinners weren’t like this one.
After we traded stories and artifacts across the table, the meal ended with dessert—each of us delivering sweet messages, blessings, and well wishes to the people beside Hall encouraged us to host a dinner like this somewhere on our own.
It was clear from our conversations that Hall had carefully chosen every person at that table, but it felt like something bigger than a guest list—like we were all there for a reason, like it was meant to be. And in many ways, it is, indeed, part of a much bigger plan.
“Being a host is not just cultivating the same patterns of friendships,” Hall told me nights before. “What would happen in the city if we broaden our understanding of what it meant to be a host to cross-pollinate our rolodexes and to bring different people together? What kind of difference could be made? What kind of soul nourishment could we have at the table through all different kinds of people?”
With a goal to connect and “cross-pollinate,” Hall encourages diners to speak about their histories and who they are at the core.
Hall’s dinners motivate guests to dig deep.
Hall has hosted well over 300 dinners just like this since 2016—10 years and counting of turning strangers into community. “Every manner of vocation has come to the table, and that’s the goal,” he says, “to bring all kinds of people together to recognize that we can be all kinds of humans together in ways that we can’t be alone.” His tables have thus welcomed everyone from members of Parliament, artists, and rocket scientists to social media influencers and political thinkers. Locally, he’s invited DJ Sun, owner of the Flat; City Controller Chris Hollins; drummer Chris “Daddy” Dave; and Rudy Rasmus, the pastor who officiated Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s wedding—the more different, the better.
“Sometimes we best experience our oneness through difference,” he says. “When you sit down with somebody who’s completely different than you, and you find out how similar at the core you guys are as human beings, it deepens your core relationship to your own humanity.”
Hall’s own history begins around a different table. He grew up in a home where his mother worked as an educator and a minister of music, and his father built a career as an upholsterer and “functional sculptor.” Between them, Hall says he inherited a habit of cross-pollinating spirituality, education, and art into things that could actually hold people up.
The dinner table became the foundation for what he’d later build. “When I was growing up, there were stories that were only told about our family around the dinner table, and told in a way that we could not hear them any other way. The meal slowed down time, just enough for us to hear timeless lessons, cautionary tales … but also family history stories,” he says. He was also, by his own admission, “nosy” from the start—when his family bought a VHS camera, he began interviewing relatives at gatherings about where they came from, becoming the family reunion archivist.
School brought its challenges, says Hall. Dyslexia made reading comprehension difficult, and being dysgraphic often meant letters and shapes got reordered and shifted on the page. But in 10th grade, a teacher encouraged him to tell his stories through visuals and sound. “I recognized that a picture or video or an audio-recorded narrative is worth more than 1000 words, even in a literature class,” he says.
He carried that instinct to Fisk and Vanderbilt universities in Nashville, where he combined coursework to design his own major in African anthropology, eventually gravitating away from the more physical archaeological digs and toward a more experiential form that conveyed history through pictures, film, and audio.
After graduating, a call to ministry led him to Pilgrim Congregational United Methodist Church, one of the oldest African American churches in the city, on Texas Southern University’s campus. He worked there as a pastor and “professional listener” for 16 years, helping launch a music conservatory, an art gallery for local artists, and the Eat Gallery, an incubator for local restaurants that helped spawn Houston institutions like Lucille’s and Green Seed Vegan.
When the church launched a film company in partnership with the Houston Arts Alliance and Mayor Annise Parker, that’s when he thought his life had changed for the worse. While he was working on a documentary focused on 16 people from across the city, his wife, overwhelmed by his many endeavors, asked for a divorce.
The divorce left him with what he calls his own “personal amnesia.” “I forgot who I was, what I could contribute, and—most mornings—why to even get out of bed. And I needed some therapy beyond the therapy that I was getting,” he says. So, he—the artist, the “nosy” anthropologist, and son of a sculptor—assembled some friends, took wood from his grandmother’s home, and built a table. He invited the 16 very different subjects from the film series that, in his mind, cost him his marriage. The only rule: no talking about what anyone did for a living. Only who they were, for life. He encouraged them to speak in story.
That was 2016. Ten years and more than 300 dinners later, the table concept has traveled with him—to a 2022 Venice Biennale pavilion built around a “social sculpture” cross-pollinating African artists and curators, to a 2023–24 interdisciplinary residency at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that spun off more than 111 community dinners across the state, to the Aspen Institute with a guest list full of thinkers, and to Tulsa, where descendants of both the 1921 Race Massacre’s survivors and perpetrators have shared meals.
Hall’s dinners have taken place around the world, including Tulsa, Oklahoma; Italy, at the Venice Biennale; and the Aspen Institute.
It all traces back to a mission trip Hall took to Kenya in 2002, when he first realized the work shouldn’t be a mission at all, but a “cross-pollination” of people and stories, a belief in what he calls the “ecotone”—the messy, fertile, biodiverse space where two separate ecosystems meet and something neither could grow alone begins to take root. That’s where some of the most interesting and moving things happen, he says.
Today, people often view his dinners and the tables he thoughtfully builds as “this underground, almost like the antithesis of a fight club, like a dinner club.” But he doesn’t see it that way, he says. “I want this to become a viral institution of bringing us together,” he says.
Now, Hall is building another home for his series: This September, he’ll launch a human development retreat in Nairobi National Park aptly called the Table, complete with a bookstore, six cabins, an art studio, an indoor-outdoor restaurant, and a culinary artist in residence—the first being Chris Williams of Lucille’s. There, he’ll connect with people from Kenya and host people from around the world for two-week stays built around various forms of nourishment—expertly prepared meals, safaris, and “cross-pollination” with other strangers, in land known to harbor the oldest human remains.
With Hall hosting, a dinner is never just a dinner.
“My work has always been to connect to that first place, to connect with the next position of human flourishing, and so it’s an ancient future place for me,” he says of Nairobi. “I just believe that if we are to impact the next iteration in human flourishing, we have to connect not just to what’s next, but to what was first.”
But Houston won’t be without him long: He’ll stay in touch, hosting a pen pal and cultural exchange program between Houston’s Imani School and a school in Nairobi. He’s also completing a residency with Project Row Houses in Third Ward, where he’ll host dinners and yoga classes. He plans to return to Houston at least every quarter.
All the while, he’ll keep building more tables, in more places, for anyone willing to sit down, listen, share, and meet in the messy, beautifully vulnerable middle ground of the Ecotone. “I want it to be for any and everybody,” he says.
