A while back I wrote about the Table Topics Gourmet Edition game, which is basically a set of cards that act as conversation starters at parties, for family, or for groups of people. Table Topics offers a wide range of subjects, but the gourmet edition intrigued me enough to buy it, and here are my impressions.
Overall, I think the idea is a good one, and if you regularly have cooking clubs or entertain with a bunch of foodies it is definitely worth considering. There are 125 cards each with one question in a deck enclosed in a see-through plastic cube. The cards are the same size as Monopoly property cards.
As for the questions, there are definitely many interesting ones in the deck, but not all of the cards will be great conversation starters, and it will depend upon you and your audience. For a couple living together for a long time, you may only find that about 50 or so cards really provoke interesting food discussion as many of questions fall flat if you know each other well.
About a quarter of the cards seem a bit contrived or vague, and I doubt that they would really inspire a lot of interesting conversation. For instance one card asks: “Which aspect of cooking do you enjoy the most?” Half of the conversation would probably be spent on trying to define what the question is exactly asking.
Or another example: “How do you choose which wine to buy?” I understand where they are going with such open-ended questions, but one could think of similar ways to broach the same subject that would start conversation a lot better. Instead these vague questions provoke a lot of uninteresting qualified answers. When it is hot out I buy this wine. When I make this meal I buy this wine. When I go to a party I buy this type of wine etc.
And then there are some questions that are rather mundane such as “What online cooking resources do you use?” and “Which food magazines do you read?” Are these topics really that interesting for discussion?
I think the deck will provide almost anyone with at least 50 useful conversation starters, and the groups I think would get the most out of the deck are:
(1) Couples in a new relationship who are also foodies. This group will find another 30-40 cards useful.
(2) Cooking groups or clubs. About a 100 cards would be useful in this setting.
(3) People who are foodies and travel a lot either domestically or internationally. About 20 or so cards will become more interesting if you have traveled.
As for professional cooks, it is hard to say. I think some of the questions would be more fun for them than home cooks, but a lot would be annoyingly basic and vague. I probably wouldn’t get this set for a professional cook unless they are budding young cooks.
Despite some marginal questions, I would recommend the Table Topics Gourmet Edition
