Hospitality in the Age of Relational Intelligence

I once asked my students an intentionally simple question: How do you feel about the issue? At one point, I saw tabs and phones open to the familiar ChatGPT interface.

I gasped nonchalantly in my mind. But to be fair, not everyone was doing it, and I could not surmise that anyone was copying word for word. Maybe they needed an outline or some structure. Maybe they could not find the words. Maybe they were tired that day. I could not even blame them. I have done it myself, too.

I am not against AI. In fact, I am for it when used for good. It is an inevitability we cannot escape. But there must be some guardrails around the things we still need to learn how to do ourselves. For me, that moment was also feedback as an educator. Perhaps part of my work now is helping students identify their emotions, feel their feelings entirely, and articulate the blobs within.

Strangely enough, that is also how I got deeper into food writing. Food is one of the most primal, primitive, tangible ways to feel through the senses.

I have been reading Isabelle Hau’s Welcome to the Era of Relational Intelligence. She calls RQ “the intelligence of attunement, of care, of knowing, and knowing how to know, each other,” and “the deeply human ability to build trust, navigate tension, repair ruptures, and create meaning with others.”

I now believe hospitality may be one of the best and most enjoyable ways to practice exactly that, because we do not have to make it so theoretical or rigid. We eat.

At a recent four-hands dinner hosted by Dominion Cellar with Chef Rhea Rizzo and Chef Carlos Garcia, I felt some of those words in the flesh. I thought I knew sambal having tasted different renditions in Indonesia and the Philippines, from Manila to La Union.

Then I tasted hers and realized that what I knew was probably not even a tenth of what was out there. Her training with Gaggan Anand and her choice of making her own renditions using the Balinese tradition adds layers and layers to this particular sambal from that evening. I was shocked to discover other facets of the diamond of a culture I thought I had already known.

The tongue is humbled as it learns there are other traditions, renditions, hands, and palates yet to be discovered. It takes trust to leave oneself in the hands of another whose lens can change the course of one’s experience and taste.

There is something strange about the relationship between cook and diner, too. It can be an almost eye-contact-less interaction, yet two people still encounter the other in time and space. Though I may not see her, I feel her and get to know something of her heart through what her hands have created.

Hau writes that our ancestors survived “not because they computed faster, but because they cooperated better, learning to communicate and read one another, share stories, resolve conflict, and coordinate care.”

And isn’t that what we do around a table? We taste, laugh, ask questions, read one another, and encounter differences and similarities through the common language of food, care, and kindness.

When Rhea’s Eastern dishes met Chef Carlos’ Western ones, I was less interested in the concept “East meets West” than in all the questions that it made me experience: what each kept, where each yielded, how different philosophies met, and how food, wine, and champagne became their own “coordination of care” between different worlds.

Hau also states that “storytelling, gossip, and song were not cultural luxuries but evolutionary necessities, tools to cultivate trust and belonging in ever-expanding groups.”— Isabelle Hau, Welcome to the Era of Relational Intelligence

I would put food somewhere in that sentence too.

Perhaps writing is my half of that two-way street: to listen to the stories she has plated, guide the reader through the journeys the mind, heart, and tongue make, and remind the hands behind that warm welcome of a meal that they matter too. That they are appreciated.

Hospitality is nothing without people, those who are served and those who serve. Maybe that is why I now see it as one of the funnest, lowest-stakes ways we can practice being human in the age of all things artificial.

For more on my encounter with Chef Rhea Rizzo, click to read.

Hau, I. C. (2026). Welcome to the Era of Relational Intelligence. Stanford Social Innovation Review, 24(2), 26–35. https://doi.org/10.48558/PY66-AH68

Paulina Miranda is a writer and educator, and the creator of The Cultural Cartographer — essays on food, memory, and human attention in the age of AI.