Everydaylives SRL · Belgium
Understanding everyday life. Making things from what we learn.
EverydayLives is a Belgian company founded by Siamack Salari and Varinder Khambay. We run Food with Varinder, two vegetarian restaurants in Belgium, and develop a few ventures of our own.
They look different, but they start from the same curiosity: how people actually live, and why.
Nothing to choose, everything to eat Food with Varinder
Food with Varinder began with dinner parties at home and became two vegetarian restaurants, one in La Hulpe and one in Leuven.
Every week there is one set menu, drawn from Indian, Iranian and British kitchens: the food we grew up with and still cook for our family.
There is nothing to choose and no second sitting. The table is yours for the evening, the way it would be in our home.
Our ventures
We also build things of our own. Some come from years of watching people. Others start with a question that won't go away.
We like ideas that make something complicated easier to understand, or help people see familiar things differently.
- 01
Discover places through the lives of the people who live there Ordinary Tuesday
Ordinary Tuesday points you to the places local people actually use: a neighbourhood to stay in, and the cafés and restaurants they keep going back to. You spend your days among the people who live there, not in the queue with every other visitor.
Less sightseeing. More living.
- 02
Thought everything through? Possible Lives
Possible Lives works on a strategy, proposal or any other idea before it goes out. It keeps asking one question until nothing has been left unthought: what lives does this bring within reach, and for whom?
Open to invited testers.
- 03
Helping organisations notice what they usually overlook EthnoClock
Organisations collect enormous amounts of information, yet miss things happening right in front of them. EthnoClock is a tool for structured observation. It helps people look carefully at everyday behaviour and at the small details conventional research misses, the ones that can change a recommendation completely.
It is built on a simple belief: before trying to understand something, you need to learn how to see it.
Where these ideas go
Some of the things we build stay with us. Others find a better home elsewhere.
Earlier work
-
Walk in their shoes EthOS
Ethnographic Observation System
EthOS let researchers see everyday life as it happened, through the phones of the people they were studying. Instead of relying on what people remembered in interviews, researchers could follow their days close to the moment things occurred.
OvationMR acquired EthOS and continues to develop and run it.
About us
Siamack and Varinder met in planning at JWT and founded EverydayLives in 2000 to film and study everyday life for brands. The research stopped; the way of looking didn't. It led to research tools, new ideas and, rather unexpectedly, two restaurants.
We don't have a grand theory connecting everything we do. We follow what interests us and work on it until it becomes useful.
Press
Our work has been covered by Channel 4, The Wall Street Journal, Gault&Millau, Paris Match, Marketing and Campaign, among others.
Get in touch
If something we're doing interests you, the restaurants or one of our ventures, write to us.
- siamack@everydaylives.com
- Siamack Salari
- @foodwithvarinder
- Company
- Everydaylives SRL
- Based in
- Genval, Belgium
- VAT
- BE 0723.477.567
Privacy
This site sets no cookies and has no forms. We keep our own simple visit log: which pages, cities and links are opened, the country and town you are browsing from and the kind of device, worked out from your internet address, which we don't store. Each visitor gets a code that changes every day, so we can count visits and see what was looked at without knowing who you are or linking one day to the next. We keep the log for 90 days, use it only to improve our sites (our legitimate interest) and share it with no one.
The site is hosted by Cloudflare, which keeps short-lived technical logs, including IP addresses, to keep the service secure. We do not use those logs to identify anyone.
If you email us, we use your address and message only to reply, and delete them when they are no longer needed. You can ask what we hold about you, or ask us to delete it, at siamack@everydaylives.com. The data controller is Everydaylives SRL, Genval, Belgium. You also have the right to complain to the Belgian Data Protection Authority.
Food with Varinder, Ordinary Tuesday, Possible Lives and EthnoClock each have their own privacy notice on their own sites.