Description
Hosting is decided in a moment of optimism, usually about three weeks out. The cost arrives in instalments: on Tuesday at the shop, on Thursday at the sink, on Saturday at eleven o’clock with four dishes of food and two clean containers. By then it is not a decision any more, it is a Saturday.
This file puts both options in the same units, and does not pretend they are equivalent — because they are not. Hosting is far cheaper in money and far more expensive in labor, and which of those you have more of is a fact about your week rather than a fact about hospitality.
What the arithmetic keeps saying
Eight people at home, bought normally: about $158 of food, drink, ice, foil and the portion that gets thrown away, and about eight and a half hours of your own time spread across five days. The same eight out at a fifty-two dollar check, with tax, tip and getting there: about $569 and an hour. Hosting saves four hundred dollars and costs seven and a half hours — which is about fifty-five dollars an hour, tax free, for work you may or may not want to be doing. That is the trade. It has never been written down before, and writing it down is most of the value.
The lines nobody counts
Deciding the menu, which happens across four evenings rather than one. Shopping, which is mostly travel. Getting the house ready — the bathroom, the chairs from the other room, the candles nobody notices until they are not there. Serving and clearing while everyone else is sitting down. Washing up, which every optimistic estimate leaves out entirely. And the next morning: the last of the glasses, the tablecloth, the chairs going back. A second pair of hands halves the physical work and does nothing at all for deciding the menu, which is the honest shape of shared cooking.
Where it refuses to help
There is no score, and there is not going to be one. The output is two ledgers and a sentence naming the trade — never a verdict. This file also carries no restaurant prices of its own, deliberately: what a specific place charges, what it is like, and whether it is any good are questions for someone who has been there, and inventing a number would make the comparison worse rather than easier. Every figure on the restaurant side is one you enter about a place you have already chosen.
Where it is not a preference
Some answers are structural rather than personal, and they come out of your declared kitchen rather than out of taste. Three resources over capacity at once is not a schedule that needs tightening, it is a menu this room cannot execute. Twenty people out of one oven at one temperature is a specific kind of evening — one long-cooked thing, room-temperature sides, nothing that needs finishing — and if the menu you want is not that evening, the honest options are a second heat source, a caterer, or a table somewhere else. Those are stop conditions, and they are stated as such.
What is included
One self-contained HTML file, about 260 KB. Four working panels: host or go out, what to buy, your kitchen, and the menu — so the served weight the money runs on comes from the dishes you actually chose rather than from an average. Printable.
How it works
Double-click and it opens in your browser. Nothing installs, nothing you type leaves your computer, it works offline forever, and there is no account.
What stays free
Deep Dish, the restaurant intelligence application, stays free and stays where the restaurant judgment belongs. This file does not paywall any of it and does not duplicate it. It answers the question that comes before you open Deep Dish at all: whether this evening should be at your table or at somebody else’s.
Who this is not for
If you love hosting and would do it at any price, you already know your answer and this will only confirm it — though the labor ledger may still change which menu you choose. The household cost figures are working grocery bands, not your receipt; the labor lines are planning estimates for a thing that is usually not estimated at all. Both are adjustable, and the file is more useful with your own numbers in it than with mine.
Version
Edition sn.deepdish.host-or-go-out, version 1.0.0. Corrections stay available to anyone who has bought it.
Your purchase includes
- Host, or Go Out — the working file, a self-contained web page that runs offline.
- Eligible corrections and updates to the same Edition, at no further cost.
You may
- Read and print it on your own devices, as often as you like.
- Use its methods and working pages in your own work, including paid work.
- If you cook or host for clients: use it while serving them, and hand a client a completed output you produced with it.
You may not
- Redistribute the publication, the blank working masters or the print file.
- Resell or republish it, or put the complete work in a shared library or community drive.
- Share your purchase credential in place of a purchase, or use the work for model-training ingestion.
Refunds
Fourteen days, no reason required. A broken, missing or materially misdescribed file is corrected or refunded without relying on that cutoff. Terms of Sale
