Throwback Thursday number nine is my May 2009 lunch in Columbia Heights, DC, with Mike Wilkinson and Alicia Wilkinson-Mehr — two of the founders of local pizza chain Pete’s New Haven Style Apizza. In the years since the interview, Pete’s has expanded to several more locations around the city, although…

The eighth throwback Thursday is my May 2009 brunch in Manhattan with Gretchen Auer, who talked about achieving her long-time goal of moving from Ohio to the Big Apple. We dined at Ta Cocina on 9th Avenue, a nice place which sadly appears to have closed.

The seventh throwback Thursday is to my May 2009 dinner in Brooklyn with single mother Lynda Eselp, who maintains a relentlessly upbeat outlook on life despite some past set-backs. In more up-to-date news, I’m tentatively scheduled to have the 118th dinner with a stranger next week in New York City….

The sixth throwback Thursday is to my March 2009 dinner with circus clown VeeKay (Diego Barquinero) at The Counter in Santa Monica, California. Diego has a fascinating story about how he got into a career under the Big Top. When we met, he showed up to the interview still in his work…

Continuing the sequential throwback Thursdays, here’s my fifth dinner interview — a meal way back in March 2009 with Dan Silverman, creator of the popular DC-area blog Prince of Petworth, which evolved into the current PoPville We met at the since-closed CommonWealth restaurant in Columbia Heights. At the time, Dan…

If you’ve not read it yet, the 116th dinner is online — it’s my lunch with actresses Jane Lynch and Kate Flannery. It took place last month in West Hollywood, California, and I discovered (and wrote) a lot, including to never sit Jane by a window without blinds, and that,…

My third dinner interview was in December 2008, my first time meeting Margarita Pracatan, a Cuban singer living in New York who found fame performing the closing numbers for the Clive James talk show in England back in the 1990s. After I started this site, I knew I wanted to…

Here’s the second Throwback Thursday; my November 2008 interview with actor and writer Jim Piddock. He’s well known for his role alongside comedy icon Fred Willard as the commentators at the dog show in Christopher Guest’s fake documentary Best In Show. But Jim’s career started many years before that role, as…

Last January on the Dining With Strangers Facebook page and Twitter, I started posting the old dinner interviews in order every Thursday for (you’ve probably guessed) Throwback Thursday. To get the site itself updated more frequently, I’m starting the feature here. Click here for the very first meal, with my…