Steamboat Springs — After almost 35 years of living in Steamboat, Tracy Barnett can remember when throwing a party meant inviting nearly everyone in town.

That might have become a bit trickier as the population has grown, but at an experimental dinner party Friday, about 30 households gathered friends and strangers to try and bring back that community spirit.

Barnett and her husband invited a couple of people they knew and reached out to a summer resident and his 13-year-old daughter to fill the requirements for Pass the Bread, an informal attempt to bring people together around food.

"People here always talk about how it can take two hours to go to the grocery store," said event organizer Lynne Garell, who gave each host the choice of cooking a full meal or hosting a potluck. "I think it's one of the joys of living in a smaller community, and I wouldn't want to lose it as the population grows."

Dinner hosts were asked to invite eight to 10 people to eat - some who they knew and some who they didn't. Garell prepared a couple of dinner conversation prompt questions for each party, and the hosts took it from there.

At Barnett's, the dinner conversation touched on how everyone around the table ended up in Steamboat. Topics covered where people had been and still wanted to go, how the town has changed and stayed the same in the past 40 years, how Michael Jackson became so famous and how to make a margarita with a blender powered by a weed whacker engine.

When Garell first started pushing the idea for Pass the Bread, she got mixed reactions.

"I think one of the things that really caught my attention was that we would tell the story of what we were planning to do and where this came from, and some people would immediately say, 'That sounds so great. I want to do it; sign me up to be a host,'" Garell said. Others weren't so quick to embrace the idea of having strangers in their homes, she said. Those people seem to be laying back, waiting to see how the first dinner event went.

Originally born out of a table discussion at a fundraiser dinner about the changing social face of Routt County, Pass the Bread dinners are designed to bring people outside of their comfortable social circles, Garell said.

"I've come to think of it in two ways. One is to more tightly knit the fabric of our community, to bring people more closely together," Garell said. She also looks at Pass the Bread as a bridge-building exercise, one that ideally will cross generational and socioeconomic divides.

"When we have a social circle of people who we hang out with, it tends to be people who are like us, who are like ourselves. So somebody who's in a low-income bracket who's in the their mid-50s is going to have a pretty defined social network," Garell said. The idea isn't to give people more friends, she said. It's more to cement a small-town spirit.

"I see this as a way for people to sort of expand their horizons - not feel like they have to go make friends with everybody, but maybe we see more familiar faces on the street after 10 years of having Pass the Bread happen," Garell said.

Depending on reaction, Pass the Bread likely will happen about twice a year, Garell said, with the next dinner potentially planned for sometime after the holiday season.