Studio Bumi is a food experience studio creating intentional communal dining experiences designed to foster connection, reflection and belonging.
Studio Bumi began as a way to bring people together through food. Since our launch in December 2023, we’ve grown from a weekly lunch set delivery into a multi-format food experience studio rooted in connection, culture, and care.
Studio Bumi’s vision is to build belonging through food, one table at a time. We believe that sharing a meal is one of the most approachable, powerful antidotes to loneliness – a timeless ritual to turn strangers into friends. Our name “Bumi” (meaning “Earth” in Indonesian) reflects a grounding in community and shared humanity. We are, at core, a food-experience studio designing spaces of connection within the loneliness economy.
This venture began with a pressing personal question: “How can we help people feel less alone in a city that never stops moving?”. Our founder, Bagus Ruswandi, experienced firsthand the isolating currents of urban life when he moved to New York City. As a recent transplant (and a former lawyer from Indonesia), he saw how even in a city of 8 million, one can feel invisible and disconnected. In response, he started hosting intimate Indonesian dinners in his Brooklyn apartment, just to bring people together. These humble gatherings revealed something profound: food could be a vehicle for genuine connection, and people were craving this kind of experience. “Yes, the food is delicious,” Bagus told a journalist, “but I don’t want to be known as a food person. I want to be known as a friend. The whole point of Studio Bumi is how communal dining can alleviate loneliness”. That insight has shaped our mission.
Read our conversation with Brooklyn Magazine here.
Our solution is two-fold: curated communal dining experiences and a scalable hosting system that enables these experiences to spread. We design high-touch, immersive group meals – whether for the public or within organizations – that are intentionally crafted to spark conversation, empathy, and a sense of belonging. Every gathering has a double benefit: attendees enjoy a unique meal and leave feeling seen and connected; furthermore, many return not just as guests but as volunteer hosts, helping to cultivate the community for others. In this way, each event is not one-off; it seeds future events through empowered participants.
Why food? Because sharing food is a universal equalizer – it breaks down social barriers and provides a comfortable structure for interaction. Research confirms our approach: dining together measurably increases happiness, trust, and social bonding. We leverage this phenomenon by going beyond just serving meals; we script experiences around the meal. For example, each of our dinners features a “Question of the Day” – a thoughtfully crafted prompt at each table that encourages guests to share stories (e.g. “What’s something someone did for you recently that made your day better?”). This simple intervention turns small talk into meaningful dialogue. As guests open up, laughter and camaraderie follow – we’ve seen complete strangers form friendships over the course of a dinner.
Our vision is ultimately infrastructural: make communal eating cool (and normal) again. Two generations ago, family dinners or neighborhood potlucks were common; today’s young adults instead eat alone or in front of a screen. We want to reverse that trend by building the infrastructure to support convivial gatherings. This means physical infrastructure (access to kitchens and venues in cities), human infrastructure (hosts, facilitators, volunteers), and digital infrastructure (a platform to coordinate events and participants). We often describe it as making “belonging” scalable. If loneliness is partly a design problem (people’s lives and cities are not designed for connection), then Studio Bumi’s solution is to intentionally design for belonging – using food as the medium, design thinking in execution, and community as the outcome.
Concretely, our solution includes: (a) Communal dining events open to the public where individuals can purchase a seat and join a shared meal with guided interaction; (b) Team-oriented dining sessions for organizations (helping colleagues bond in a fun, social setting); and (c) an evolving hosting playbook and toolkit that allows our concept to be replicated by trained community hosts in new locations. Underlying all of this is a strong ethos: “Emotions first, tech-light.” We deliberately emphasize face-to-face engagement and analog charm (candle-lit tables, hand-written prompt cards) rather than building yet another app to solve loneliness. Technology for us is a supporting actor (for logistics, sign-ups), not the star.
In an era flooded with digital “solutions” that often exacerbate isolation, our bet is on real human experiences.