170 neighbors dine together in a secret Mission alley

Everyone sits down for their pasta dinner at the annual Mission Terrace Alley Party. Everyone sits down for their pasta dinner at the annual Mission Terrace Alley Party. Photo: Beth Hoffman Photo: Beth Hoffman Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close 170 neighbors dine together in a secret Mission alley 1 / 5 Back to Gallery

Imagine dining in the street in the Mission District with 170 of your neighbors and not having to block off any major roads or get any permits. It might seem impossible, but in San Francisco's largely unknown Mission Terrace, this has become a much anticipated annual event.

It all began four years ago, soon after food writer Beth Hoffman and chef John Hogeland moved into the neighborhood and Beth hatched an ambitious plan:

"I wanted to invite the neighborhood for dinner," she wrote in her blog, "like I'd seen in Gourmet or Saveur magazines, where whole Italian towns eat dinner together in the streets. Long tables, beautifully arranged, with hundreds of people sitting down for the same meal (usually spaghetti) at the same time."

So how did it happen? Well, location was key. The alleys of Mission Terrace are actually easements owned by the homeowners, accessed by PG&E and rarely driven through by vehicles. These seemed the perfect setting for her vision of communal dining.

"There are alleys on every block of Mission Terrace," she explained. "And there is a lot of variety of what goes on in them. Some are turned into gardens, others are overgrown nightmares."

Transforming the alley near her house on a more longterm basis was in fact one of the inspirations behind the dinner: "Part of the concept was the more it's used as a kind of park, the less people will use it for sleeping and doing drugs."

So on the night of the dinner, the alley was lined with tables — most from people's houses and others on loan from the SFPD's Ingleside Station — from one end to the other. Once in place, they were covered in butcher paper and adorned with flowers and wine.

"Everyone gathered at 5 and people brought a ton of other food" and the party began. Then, when John's spaghetti sauce was ready, they all lined up as he ladled out his meatless marinara from a huge vat.

Read Beth Hoffman's story of how residents have pitched in to make the annual Mission Terrace Alley Dinner such a success. Maybe it could be a blueprint for other neighborhoods looking for a night of enjoying one another's company, whether in a small alley, a large driveway, or in the middle of a busy (but hopefully blocked off) street.