It’s always a pleasure to try out a new restaurant local to our Old Street office for a TableCrowd dinner and last night our Startup Engine crowd descended on newish-to-the-scene Rotary Bar & Diner, right by Old Street tube. The menu was simple, burgers, steak and fish – all very tasty, as, it was reported, were the virgin cocktails.

We had 11 diners from the Startup Engine Crowd, all ready to meet and eat. It was good to see our valued regular Damien Allison at the table, his startup SiteMorph helps web sites grow using marketing, engagement and conversion optimisation ideas. He also does consultancy work and I spotted a few other diners picking his brains while he tucked into his burger.

This was a totally fashionable dinner. We were joined by Debbie Lafayette Miller, who is deep in research to understand the manufacturing process for her lingerie fashion brand which should be available for sale next year. Paul Persky also joined us. He is a fashion and music photographer by trade but who has also launched in beta a rather impressive photography application. Reactize allows users to upload a sequence of images which then displays as one reactive image. Clever stuff – definitely worth a look. Paul and I met at London Business Starters Lion’s Cage event, which I expect to see him pitching at in the coming months!

Winston Veerender is a techie and his company is Samran Technology. He develops software using his crack team of 30 developers based in India as well as having developed Social Knitter, social media management tools that companies can use to execute their social media strategies. Techie Nigel and Lynn Myrick are part of a 2 person team that is Agile Environment. Together they assist startups and SMEs with project planning, development and staffing amongst other things. There was much talk of scrums and sprints and books I should probably read….

Rand Jawad, Founder and CEO of Nature’s Wonders, a company that promotes people and sells products which help support natural health and well being, is looking to launch a blog which will be brimming with engaging content. Francesca is working towards her MBA in London. She works on a food industry startup in her home country Italy, as well as a packaging project she has started in London through the social enterprise part of her course.

Wesley Rashid co founded 4 person company Incisive London, which provides accounting services to startups and SME’s in a modern and adaptable way. He came directly from an event he hosted at Google Campus to showcase his company’s services. All those in favour of a Startup Engine dinner themed around accounting issues facing startups, say ‘aye’!!

Rotary Bar & Diner, we enjoyed and we’ll be back soon for more social dining. We have some interesting ‘Startup Engine’ dinners coming up including a dinner based around copywriting.  A dinner for people to talk about the importance of copy, how it places in an ever-changing industry, and where copywriters rank beside startup mainstays like engineers and graphic designers, so get involved.