The sofa surfing chef who created a home

by Edwin Finch, 8 April 2025

After over a year of travel, the time to settle down into a new place had arrived. In February, I started renting a room in a house with four other roommates.

As you've likely experienced yourself, moving into a new place with a bunch of people you don't know can put you anywhere on the landscape of joy & sorrow. You could be struggling to sleep amidst noisy roommates. You could have a landlord that is apathetic to helping you address problems on the property. Or in a less dreadful situation, you could have people that are quiet, but almost too quiet: no one talks to each other, and you end up feeling like you've booked an extended stay at a lame hotel.

There is another possibility on this landscape. In what might seem like some kind of dream, you could end up in a house that is filled with roommates that all cook for each other and play board games together throughout the week. And luckily for me, it's not a dream: it's exactly the place I have found myself in this time around.

...and it's in large part thanks to a sofa surfing chef named Paul.

Photo of Paul and I

Fortuitously surfing his way into our house

Paul is a good friend of Tony. Tony is the owner of the house & a fellow roommate here. They met a few years ago during covid and quickly became good friends through good conversations and tasty meals. Since they met, Paul moved from Ontario to New Brunswick with his family, but the two stayed in touch. When Paul began planning this trip back to Ontario to see friends, he had originally intended to stay at our house for only a week, but due to a number of last-minute cancellations, he ended up staying with us for about a month.

A killer chef, Paul's passion for cooking began as soon as he could tippy-toe his way up to reach the spice cupboards. Beyond cooking at home, he also went to a trade school where he developed his skills even further. I am not exaggerating when I say that Paul has got skills: the broad spectrum of cuisines he has mastered is breathtaking. From Western classics like pork tenderloin to far out-dishes from Asia, it is clear that even though Paul has not yet travelled outside of Canada, his cooking can send you almost anywhere in the world.

Even though he doesn't cook professionally right now, he has kept his skills sharp solely through his love of the game (aka making meals for his friends & family as much as he can). So naturally, as any passionate chef would, he used his extra time at our house to make as many meals as he could for us.

The tasty transformation of house into home

When all of this sofa surfing and culinary crafting began, I had only just moved in a few days prior. Most evenings I'd be either hanging out with family or running errands. I'd met all of my roommates and everyone was friendly, but we didn't talk or hang out much (as is the usual default of renting a room in a shared house). But a strange thing started happening: I'd come home almost every night to find all of my new roommates (and sometimes also their partners) hanging out in the living room together enjoying whatever Paul had whipped up.

He'd ask me to take a seat and then proceed to serve me a portion. Part of me still thinks he wasn't really doing this for me; he was so excited to see people's reaction's to his cooking that it lit him up like a Christmas tree. This enthusiasm for cooking was electric. After my first bite, he'd go off telling me exactly how he'd made it. Most of the explanations were gibberish to me, as someone who literally spent a year of his life living off of what is infamously known as "the meat box", an extra-large Tupperware container filled with nothing but just different varieties of cooked meat.

Before I knew it, coming home to dine with my roommates became a part of everyday life. The combo of Paul's enthusiasm for cooking and the fun of getting to know everyone was impossible to say no to. Things quickly went from feeling like I was living in a house with roommates to living in a home with friends.

The era of the meat box had seen its final day; a new chapter of good meals and even better company was now being written.

A month of good times and hot peppers

We'd do more than just enjoy good cooking together; we began to play card games, Mario Party and jam out to music. We swiftly moved through the North American "what do you do for work?" pleasantries to more European-style rowdy conversations. Bets were won and lost (the loser being forced to eat insanely hot peppers 🥲) and memories were made.

That month flew by, and before we knew it, Paul had to go back home to New Brunswick. We were heartbroken. A good friend had just departed, one who had helped bring us all together. I'm not sure about the other roommates, but I definitely had the worry: is he the magic glue that we need to keep hanging out? Are we losing our glue?

Luckily for us, we all wanted to create our own recipe for glue. Tony came up with the idea to keep the good times rolling by cooking for each other. The pitch was that throughout the week, each roommate would cook one meal, with enough for some leftovers too. Everyone was sold, without a second of hesitation. We set up a Google Calendar for the cooking schedule and a Splitwise group for the bills, and started cooking meals together right after Paul went back home.

The legacy of Paul lives on

We're now a full month into this project of keeping the flame lit through our shared effort in the kitchen. We're not nearly as good as Paul, but it's actually kind of fun having to figure it out together. People get their groceries, cook em' up, and bring everyone together at the table to enjoy each other's cooking. We try to share advice with each other on how our cooking could be improved, and surely enough, it does feel like we're getting a tiny bit better, even just a month in. We still enjoy card games too (shoutout Coup), but have chosen to forego the hot pepper "threat bets" in favour of the more tasty cookie-based winning bets (🙏).

Beyond the hanging out, there's also another benefit I wasn't expecting from this whole roommate cooking experiment: my motivation to cook has went from 0 to 100.

Before this, I never really had much motivation to cook. It's not that I hadn't bonded over good cooking: my mom and brother are both great in the kitchen, I lived in China for a year and am witness to the bonding power of dumplings, and also like sharing sweets with other people (shoutout La Patisserie in Kitchener!)

Paul's nightly meals shifted my perspective on cooking because these meals so quickly transformed my new place from just "the bedroom I'm renting" into home . I went from not knowing my roommates at all, to being able to goof around and get into legitimately good conversations with them. Of all of the places I've lived, I had never experienced this kind of swift transformation from house to home, and I love it. I'm actually inspired to cook now because I want to share more good times with my friends and keep deepening that sense of home, for all of us.

In addition to that, there's also the cold hard fact that having your name on a calendar and four other people depend on you for their meal (and leftovers) is a fantastic impetus to get into the kitchen.

And so, the legacy of Paul lives on.