Getting Started
I learned about dinner parties from my college friend, Crnk — who has always been eminently competent and grownup. Senior year, while I was living in my sorority's house (don't judge) with a kitchen barely suitable for heating up frozen pizza (envision mice scurrying about, cake baking supplies from the 70s still hanging around, etc.), she lived in a real house, with an actual kitchen. And she realized that dinner parties were a seemingly casual way to invite boys you might be interested in over so you could talk to them without a beer pong paddle in hand. I took this lesson with me when we graduated and I threw my first dinner party within weeks of moving to Boston. I made everything that I knew how to make at that point (thank you, Ina Garten): a roast chicken, panzanella, and lemon fusilli with arugula. The chicken took twice as long as intended because I put it into the oven breast-side down (a mistake I still make sometimes), and I think I served it out of a tin foil pan, but still — I successfully fed other humans.
A year into living in Boston, my friend Mollie’s boyfriend, Chris, moved there as well. He introduced us to the concept of “family dinner,” something friends of his had been doing in Chicago. The idea was that you’d have a small core group of people who had dinner together on a semi-regular basis, rotating hosting duties. The host would choose a theme and invite a few people who weren’t in the core group to join, and everyone would bring a dish. It was a great way to meet new people, test new recipes, and elevate our social scene a bit.
When I moved to New York a few years later, I tried to get it started here. But I chose the wrong core, they never wanted to cook and we ended up going out for dinner most of the time — nice, but not the point. Thankfully, Mollie and Chris moved to New York about a year after I did, and with them here, family dinner got going again. A few years in, participation started to wane and it just sort of petered out. My secret theory is that since many of us were now living with partners, there was less of an incentive to lure cute people over with dinner party invites.
But I missed trying new recipes, and having a reason to clean up my apartment, and getting to be social without having to go outside, and most importantly — using my hands to pick at leftovers while gossiping with the last remaining guests. So in 2019, I’m going to throw a dinner party every month. I’ll post the menus here, and we’ll see how it all goes!
