A WORLD OF POSSIBILITIES

Wandering Table provides immersive dining experience

By Chereen Langrill

When Gina D’Orazio Stryker looks at a garden, she sees a world of endless opportunity.

It’s a worldview she developed as a little girl in Challis, Idaho, where she would wander through her grandmother’s garden and fruit trees, envisioning future delicacies as she gazed at the tapestry of rich colors around her. One day when she was five years old, she collected a beet and a plum and brought them to her grandmother, along with a request for her to make something with the found items and some cinnamon.

Her discoveries became a jam that she enjoyed for mornings to come.

“I have always had this love of food,” Stryker said. “Everywhere I went there was always ceremony around it.”

Stryker has the same curiosity and love of food today as she did when she was a child. These days, instead of drawing inspiration from her grandmother’s garden, she now finds it at the Boise Farmers Market. And those weekly finds are the springboard for the meals that she creates for Wandering Table, a business she launched in Boise in the summer of 2024.

Wandering Table is an immersive dining experience offered in a different location each month. The exact location isn’t announced until 24 hours before the event, and while the menu and the location are a secret, guests can always count on fresh, locally-sourced food and an opportunity to meet—and eat with—the farmer who provided it.

“It just started from the idea of creating magic at the dinner table,” Stryker said. “The Wandering Table, for me, was meant to be a sharing of my heart. An offering.”

The seven-course meal is created based on the food Stryker finds at the farmers market on Saturdays before each event. It’s a common practice for Stryker, who prefers to plan meals around the fresh food she discovers, whether it’s in a garden or at a local market. One of her favorite memories is of walking through a spice market in Istanbul.

“All my senses were firing,” she said. “I would pick spices, then go back and cook something. It was one of the most amazing experiences I’ve had.”

When she decided to launch Wandering Table in July, Stryker was already running her other business, Clean Cuisine, which delivers healthy, fresh meals to customers’ doors each week. But she missed the opportunity to create meals for clients in their homes, the way she did working around the world as a personal chef. By August, she was hosting her first dinner.

Although Stryker has years of experience and went to culinary school in Italy, she believes that anyone can elevate their own food experience. The Boise Farmers Market is a great starting point, she said. Or try playing with spices by adding something different to a familiar food. Stryker recently added miso to a caramel sauce and loved it so much she’s including it in an upcoming dinner.

“I live by the policy of ‘The more you give, the more you live,’” she said. “And food is like that. Lean into it all. Even with cooking. Lean into the generosity of the meals put before you from the earth.”