How to Host a Dinner Party & Stand in the Rain
This past weekend, I hosted a dinner party that included 5 courses, an unplanned cocktail interlude, no fewer than 6 bottles of wine, and a number of patient lessons I thought I’d share with you.
Where to begin
Hosting a formal dinner party is a bit of a lost art form for a host of reasons. I could speculate on a number of them, but to get to the meat of things: groceries aren’t cheap and leisure time is limited. When I’m planning on hosting a dinner, I always consider how many courses and pars of each dish I can afford to make before cooking stops feeling fun, and I start feeling really broke. For me, that often looks like 2-4 guests in addition to my husband and myself. In the case of my latest dinner party, I had loftier goals, so I brought in a co-host. Lucky for me, my friend Josh is a good match in culinary skill, enthusiasm, temperament and taste, which made him an obvious choice and brought a natural ease to co-hosting. Sharing the planning, labor and cost of everything with someone else can make the spectacular achievable, and there’s this sort of warm afterglow you get from having done something wonderful together that going it alone just can’t replicate.
Making a lot with a little
I like to think I’m good at taking something small or simple and providing a context for it that makes it seem special, romantic, even. I have a hard time bringing myself to use Partiful — it just lacks je ne sais quoi, so for our invitation, I put together a simple greeting and a sample of the menu, wrote it out in inky cursive, scanned it and sent it off via text. The day of the party, we greeted our guests with a plait or warm bread (not a typo, I braided it and served it directly on the table) and a small mountain of whipped butter, which was nothing more than a simple dinner roll dough and half a pound of mid-tier European butter beat to hell in a stand mixer. We served gorgeous fruit and deviled eggs made fancy with a single boquerón draped over each. I’d been dying to make a vol-au-vent since I saw it in The Taste of Things, and while we splurged on the good puff pastry (it’s Dufour, by the way), we opted for tilapia in the fish chowder we filled them with. I mean, really, who would notice the difference between tilapia, cod or haddock when it’s swimming in a buttery pool of warm cream, aromatics and bacon fat? For the main course, nothing says “special occasion” like a slow-roasted protein. I don’t make the rules, I only interpret them, so when we planned our menu, we knew we wanted to make that a centerpiece. While a prime rib or rack of lamb are stunning options, truthfully a beautifully roasted chicken is equally good, and two of them will feed 10 for about $30. We filled in with plenty of seasonal produce and root vegetables, and no shortage of sauces, including the hollandaise and béarnaise Josh made with the leftover egg yolks from the meringue I made earlier in the day. Speaking of, dessert was a show-stopping baked Alaska. While I did opt to make the cake and ice cream from scratch, this is a dessert that can easily be store bought and assembled. That said, it looks exceptionally impressive, especially when you torch the meringue at the table for all your guests at the end of the night.
Rolling with the punches
I’m a Capricorn who uses Notion for project planning as a leisurely pass time, so know that I did make an hour-by-hour prep and service schedule for the day of the dinner party. That said, things go wrong, and you can’t plan for everything. Though the forecast previously showed no warning of rain, a light shower came down over the tables in my garden just after the salad course and before the fish. We decided to grab the food and crowd into the house for a “cocktail intermission.” Everyone had a good sense of humor about it. We poured drinks, kept grabbing little snacky bits, and gave it another chance after about 15 minutes. And while the clouds kept looming, everything held up and the rain made the weather delightfully cool and cleared every last fly (which have seemingly taken over the city of Austin this spring). I thought that was kind of beautiful.
My measure of success for any gathering I’m hosting is this: Can the party continue without me? If the answer is yes, I’ve put together the right group of people, created an easy sparkling atmosphere and made everyone feel welcome and comfortable enough that when I step into the kitchen to grab something or take a quiet moment to touch up my lipstick in the bedroom vanity, laughter keeps rolling in through the open screen door and by midnight, wine is still being poured, punch cups are clinking together and no one has even thought to leave the table.
