🍷🍴 how to host a dinner party 🍴🍷

The latest in the How To Be Creative™ series, we dive into the art of the dinner party.

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Not to toot my own horn but I am a very good dinner party host.

This came from a lot, a lot, a lot of practice of both attending and hosting really good dinners. Plus, for a series of years, Bobby and I challenged ourselves to host two or three dinners a month, some years holding a specific monthly cadence for them. Hosting isn’t easy, instead a skill requiring stamina and soft skills not too dissimilar from running a meeting, public speaking, cooking, and expressing literal and metaphorical taste. A dinner party is your chance to share your world, your approach to living. Have fun! Show off! But do plan the experience.

To help you all, I wanted to share advice on the art of the dinner party, to help you get into your hosting bag. I’ve divided this (Long!) dispatch into two sections: the big, planned, weekend dinner parties, the main type of dinner party, along with smaller, weeknight dinner parties, which are a secondary but still valid option. They are two separate beasts with two separate approaches. Take these rules with plenty of salt but know I am fifteen years running in dinner partying and, to my knowledge, few have complained (and those who did were…poor guests which, funny enough, ended in dissolved friendships) (more on that in a moment).

For big, planned, weekend dinner parties…

Give people at least two weeks — ideally a month — of notice.

Over email — Not text! — send a note to a group of people with a date in mind, as a starting point. Don’t send out a giant ugly Calendly link or solicit dates from the group: take charge and give a date as its your house and party. With so much time in advance, you have plenty of time to juggle competing calendars. Consider 6P or 7P for start time, with dinner-on-the-table two hours later, a detail you don’t have to tell people but you should know. Which is to say: dinner parties are like a play, requiring promotion (The notice email!) and a script, to help you navigate where you’re going. Nothing should be improvised. While you’re sending a message, ask for dietary restrictions so you can properly plan.

Saturdays > Sundays > Thursdays > Fridays

To the point of offering a date, always aim for a Saturday as that gives people the day-of to do any prep and or chores of their own while giving you the same time to prep. This also affords people a Sunday to recover, pending if you lean into the party of it all (WHICH YOU SHOULD!! GET ROWDY AND MESSY BY THE END OF THE NIGHT!!!!!). A close and quaint runner up is Sunday, which should skew earlier (People over at 4P or 5P!) and perhaps less insane as everyone likely has work the next day. Thursdays are good for the more impromptu-but-planned night, although they’re perfect candidates for the “smaller” dinner party. They also work because one doesn’t have to sacrifice any of their weekend. But Fridays? Not really preferred as people are exhausted by the end of the week and the last thing you want to do after work is having to “be on.” Protect yourself and skip a Friday party — but no one will be bummed about a Friday party.

Your group should be a mix.

Yes, you could invite all people who know each other — but the fun of a dinner party is to help people meet each other. Combine friend groups! Invite someone you want to know better! This isn’t just an event for the same people you see all the time: this is where you branch out and flex your network, bringing people together to meet each other and grow your and their world. Consider couples along with singer persons, the older and the younger, those you work with and those you don’t: spread the tentpoles of your life. Aim for an even number though as to not have any odd ones out.

Go for the double Ds when it comes to guests bringing things: drinks and dessert.

Don’t let people just bring shit: tell them very specifically what to bring — and that should be drinks and or dessert. Those items are the liminal spaces of a dinner party, the things that disappear fastest and or that can be easily saved and savored by yourself or sent home with others. This said…

But insist on a few things.