
The art of the dinner party - mooreds
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/25/magazine/food-issue-art-of-dinner-party.html
======
telesilla
I love cooking dinner for 10 people. It's exciting, it takes a week of
planning, a full day or two of cooking, and the glow afterwards when everyone
has gone home full and happy lasts a lifetime. I can remember the faces of my
guests from every party I've ever thrown.

Dinner parties are perfect because I'm completely unsociable when it comes to
regular parties - I detest smalltalk. Over dinner however, talk is deep and
profound and often difficult and challenging. Friendships can be broken, or
new ones made that last a lifetime.

The author has a problem with cellphones? Ask kindly for them to not be at the
table, forgo the Instagram credit and make a stand. It's not going to ruin
everyone's day for not having a filtered photo of your lobster this one time.

For those who don't think they can cook: it's a combination of understanding
food chemistry and following instructions. Think about a favourite meal you
had once and try and recreate - all good food needs is passion, the rest
follows.

~~~
seanwilson
> I detest smalltalk. Over dinner however, talk is deep and profound and often
> difficult and challenging.

Smalltalk is how you get to know a little about someone so you can move on to
deeper things you both want to talk about. It's really unusual to just launch
into deep conversation with someone you barely know.

~~~
wenc
Agreed. I used to think small talk was superficial, but it does serve a social
purpose in mixed-company. It greases the wheel and initiates people into
deeper conversation.

Without it, the atmosphere gets really intense really quickly, which can be
weird unless you're among old friends or people who have high emotional
intelligence to start with (can't always count on that).

~~~
m3kw9
A lot of people hate small talk because of their success rate of small talk.
“How are you doing?”, “yeah it’s good, how have you been?” “Not too bad”.
“...”

~~~
wenc
There are many good opening lines, but I've found that simply asking "How's
your week been?" works much better than a "How are you" because it nudges
people to to tell a story.

Then I ask questions about that story.

------
quizme2000
My wife and I's friends all have children the same age as ours and they are
toddlers. Dinner parties are right out, but Sunday waffle brunch is on point.
It is a fun affair with everyone including the kids. After everyone eats it
becomes comically victorian. The Sober Dads and Friendly Neighbors drink
coffee, BS, and supervise the kids (Out of Earshot, of course). The cocktail
crowd will relax into an adult conversation as much as any dinner party
without the urgency of a baby sitter or the guilt of leaving ones partner at
home to enjoy an evening out. I enjoy our brunch with friends as much as any
dinner party I can recall.

~~~
cylinder
When I think about the reasons to pursue owning a house over an apartment, I
will remember the Waffle Brunch. It sounds like such a house with a yard
thing.

------
ThomPete
Resonates 100% with me. I also started doing dinner parties at a very young
age. Always loved it, loved the hosting part and the discussions that unfold.

There is an art to a good dinner party. People have to feel welcome, you have
to have a laid back enough attitude that they don't feel they are dining with
the queen while still having enough structure that the dinner feels like it's
going somewhere.

Maybe I am just lucky but I have not experienced people looking on their
phones all the time at least not enough for it to be a problem.

The biggest problem these days are finding people who eat everything and like
all sorts of food.

~~~
elorant
Do you cook the food yourself or hire someone to do it for you?

~~~
ThomPete
Do it myself of course :)

------
Simulacra
I've always struggled with dinner parties. I love them immensely, but I found
that it's hard to get people to come. Just to get more than three friends in
the same room can be tough. The older I get the more I find that people prefer
to stay home, or go out to eat. Going to someone's home seems like extra
effort

~~~
alphaoide
You're friends are not introvert, are they? I say "Yes" more to those who seem
to understand an introvert more. I say "No" more to those I don't have much in
common. In my case, I say "Yes" more to invitation from techies than from
sport lovers.

~~~
devdad
Why is this being downvoted? It seems that he identify as an introvert and
gives his side to the story?

------
dogruck
My tips:

1\. Invite each guest individually. Don’t use a mass mail or an online service

2\. It’s not about the food.

3\. Serve something you’ve cooked several times before. Or order in. Or make
cooking a communal process.

~~~
ghaff
#3 isn’t necessarily my style but not sure why the downvotes.

~~~
jraph
I wondered the same for the downvotes.

#3 (communal process) can be really fun and enjoyable. It depends on the
people. Each time I experienced it, people were always having great time.
Perfection should not be sought. Letting people add their creativity can help.
It can really be a good idea. But do not force anyone not willing to
participate and do not make such people feel like they are jerks.

#2 really depends on the people. It has been wrong most of the cases in my
experience. People often enjoy food. Food is part of the pleasure for many
people!

~~~
dogruck
I enjoy good food too. Certainly depends on the people. For others, food is a
tremedous point of stress. But I think all people can enjoy a dinner party,
regardless of the food.

Two somewhat related cultural touchstones:

1\. Truman Capote’s party of the century — the menu hardly seems like a
highlight:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_and_White_Ball](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_and_White_Ball)

> The night's menu, to be served at midnight, consisted of scrambled eggs,
> sausages, biscuits, pastries, spaghetti and meatballs and chicken hash, a
> specialty of the Plaza and one of Capote's favorite dishes.

2\. Dialog from Glengarry Glen Ross:

Ricky: Did you ever take a dump - made you feel like you'd just slept for
twelve hours?

James Lingk: That I -

Ricky: Yes? [James Lingk laughs.]

James Lingk: I don't know.

Ricky: Or a piss? _Great meals fade in reflection._ Everything else gains. You
know why? 'Cause it's only food. This shit we put on us keeps us going. It's
only food. The great fucks you may have had, what do you remember about 'em?

------
zappo2938
For people in their 20s and 30s in a culture where showing up late or not at
all after rsvp is acceptable it is better to invite lots of people having all
the foods on the stove keeping warm or laid out family style so people can
grab a plate when they arrive or are hungry. Say it starts at 7pm and expect
people arriving as late as 11pm.

~~~
toomanybeersies
I've found a good way to actually figure out how many people are coming is to
require people to actually write a message to say they're going. If you just
hit the "going" button and don't reply saying you're actually coming, I assume
you have no intention of showing up.

Also, it's incredibly rude to show up to an event 4 hours late. 30 minutes, I
can understand, if you got caught up, but 4 hours is taking the piss.

------
jgh
I’m not sure I’ve ever been to any dinner parties in my life. I always thought
they were an upper middle class wasp thing.

~~~
Tenhundfeld
I suppose it depends on the definition of dinner party. (I only skimmed TFA,
so apologies if you're addressing something specific in the article.)

IMO, a dinner party doesn't have to be some stuffy affair. It's just a group
of people getting together to share a meal, typically in someone's home. I
often host a Sunday dinner for family and occasionally a friend or two and
their families. The numbers are sometimes in the 10+ range, including kids.
It's usually a pretty casual event, some food, some drinks, some nice
conversations.

You might say that's just having a few people over for dinner, not a "dinner
party." Maybe you're right. But I think the act of communal in-home dining,
involving some family and/or friends, is very common across cultures. The
WASPy "dinner party" is just one variation on that.

~~~
jgh
Yeah I get the feeling just based on the article and the comments here that
people are referring more to the waspy formal dinner party and not so much the
more casual / common incarnations. Obviously growing up and all that we would
get together with families around the neighborhood all the time and have
barbeque or whatever. As an adult I've been living apartment life, along with
everyone in my social sphere, so dinner parties aren't really a thing but
getting people together at a bar/restaurant is..

Dinner parties to me are just sort of a funny cultural quirk that I don't
really get, I guess. Another one is how everyone else knows all the common
dances at weddings. I've been to a few but not enough to, you know, get the
choreography right lol.

------
mbrock
For balance, I shall quote my favorite curmudgeon, Phillip Lopate, in his
personal essay about dinner parties:

 _I don 't expect the reader to agree with me. That's not the point. Unlike
the behavior called for at a dinner party, I am not obliged, sitting at my
typewriter, to help procure consensus every moment. So I am at liberty to
declare, to the friend who once told me that dinner parties were one of the
only opportunities for intelligently convivial conversations to take place in
this cold, fragmented city, that she is crazy. The conversation at dinner
parties is of a mind-numbing caliber. No discussion of any clarifying rigor—be
it political, spiritual, artistic, or financial—can take place in a context
where fervent conviction of any kind is frowned upon, and the desire to follow
through a sequence of ideas must give way every time to the impressionistic,
breezy flitting from topic to topic. Talk must be bubbly but not penetrating.
Illumination would only slow the flow. Some hit-and-run remark may
accidentally jog an idea loose, but in such cases it is better to scribble a
few words down on the napkin for later than attempt to "think" at a dinner
party._

 _What do people talk about at such gatherings? The latest movies, the
priciness of things, word processors, restaurants, muggings and burglaries,
private versus public schools, the fool in the White House (there have been so
many fools in a row that this subject is getting tired), the undeserved
reputations of certain better-known professionals in one 's field, the
fashions in investments, the investments in fashion. What is traded at the
dinner-party table is, of course, class information. You will learn whether
you are in the avant-garde or rear guard of your social class, or, preferably,
right in step._

 _As for Serious Subjects, dinner-party guests have the latest New Yorker in-
depth piece to bring up. People who ordinarily would not spare a moment
worrying about the treatment of schizophrenics in mental hospitals, the fate
of Great Britain in the Common Market, or the disposal of nuclear wastes
suddenly find their consciences orchestrated in unison about these problems,
thanks to their favorite periodical—though a month later they have forgotten
all about it and are on to something new. The dinner party is a suburban form
of entertainment. Its spread in our big cities represents an insidious Fifth
Column suburbanization of the metropolis. In the suburbs it becomes necessary
to be able to discourse knowledgeably about the heart of the city, but from
the viewpoint of a day-shopper. Dinner-party chatter is the communicative
equivalent of roaming around shopping malls._

 _[...]_

 _The first to leave breaks the communal spell. There is a sudden rush to the
coat closet, the bathroom, the bedroom, as others, under the protection of the
first defector 's original sin, quit the Party apologetically. The utopian
dream has collapsed: left behind are a few loyalists and insomniacs, swillers
of a last cognac. "Don't leave yet," begs the host, knowing what a sense of
letdown, pain, and selfrecrimation awaits. Dirty dishes are, if anything, a
comfort: the faucet's warm gush serves to stave off the moment of anesthetized
stock-taking—Was that really necessary?—in the sobering silence that follows a
dinner party._

~~~
cylinder
Wow that is pretty spot on.

------
mcrider
If you like this article, the author (Gabrielle Hamilton) has a great book
called Blood, Bones and Butter that I highly recommend (though it gets a bit
dull at the end).

------
alexhutcheson
An alternative take: [https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/dinner-
parties](https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/dinner-parties)

------
fredsted
Never expected this to pop up on HN!

------
Double_a_92
I don't understand... Why are people acting like cooking for your friends and
family is a super formal thing?

~~~
dagw
Cooking for your friends and family obviously isn't formal thing at all, but
hosting a dinner party is something else. A "Dinner Party" is a specific type
of event expected to have a certain theme and structure that makes it
different and more formal from just having some people over for dinner. Of
course it doesn't have to be super formal, but certainly more formal than
having a few mates over for some food and a few beers.

~~~
Tenhundfeld
I'm curious what you consider the specific attributes that are required to
turn "cooking for your friends and family" into "hosting a dinner party."

IMO, they're both variations on communal in-home dining, but I can see how
they fall at different ends of a spectrum. Cooking for a large family
gathering doesn't feel like a "dinner party;" that's just family dinner.
Whereas inviting 10 (relative) strangers to dinner feels like a dinner party.

But then there's a whole gray area in the middle where I'm not sure. For
example, I cook family dinner on Sunday for 4-8 family members in the area,
and I sometimes invite a neighbor family or a few friends over to join that
meal. Does inviting the non-family people turn it into a dinner party?

I don't know. It kind of feels like one. A lot of people who don't know each
other well (or at all) and don't normally eat together are sharing a meal,
some drinks, some stories. If that's not a "dinner party", what other
attributes would need to be present to turn it into a dinner party?

~~~
goialoq
A dinner party requires a heaping helping of pretension.

------
yipopov
My dinner party pet peeve is hosts (or overly enthusiastic guests) who miss
the point of bracketing the wines of the courses with an aperitif and a
digestif, and instead bring out one bottle of red wine after the other until
late into the night. It's in bad taste and a recipe for getting guests wasted,
sick, or both.

------
cylinder
Why does this author continuously avoid using commas, instead using the "and"
effect?

~~~
strictnein
It's written in a conversational style.

------
0898
Hit back to say: TFA is beautifully written.

~~~
ajkjk
What is TFA?

~~~
grzm
The {Fine|Featured|F*} Article

~~~
cperciva
Or if you're Canadian (of a certain generation), The Fuddle-Duddled Article.

------
EliRivers
I can't imagine the luxury of living somewhere with a room large enough for a
big dinner table to just sit in (and not just vanish instantly because it's
the living room and everyone needs the space constantly). Author seems to
suggest eight or so people around the same table. Wow. That kind of thing is
the preserve of the rich or the elderly, who bought a house when they were
cheap. Middle-class dinner parties in someone's house used to be quite common
in the UK; now they're a rich people thing. I do know some rich people who
have dining rooms; a room just for eating in. It does seem very civilised.

~~~
irrational
My wife and I have seven children. So 9+ around the dinner table is apparently
not the preserve of only the rich or the elderly.

~~~
pjc50
Feeding and clothing nine children almost certainly requires a family income
above median...

~~~
irrational
I'm not sure what the median is, but my wife is a stay at home mom (no
income), and I make around $100k. In a typical 2 income household that would
average out to the two of us making $50k each.

~~~
pjc50
[https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-
calculator-201...](https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-
calculator-2016/) puts that at almost 75%th percentile; i.e. your household is
better off than three quarters of Americans. Puts you roughly in the upper
middle class.

~~~
irrational
Yeah, but those numbers don't have adjustments for area you live in ($100k is
very different in Silicon Valley vs many places in the rural midwest), number
of people in the family, etc. I think we would be closer to middle middle
class. All of our neighbors are mailmen, receptionists, paramedics, non-profit
fundraisers, elementary school teachers, paralegals (though, she got busted on
a DUI and is out of work now), etc.

