Is the dinner party dead?

10 April 2012

Well, if it isn't quite dead yet, the dinner party is certainly on the critical list. Mounting evidence suggests this ritual is in trouble. One colleague of mine recently attended a grand supper in Notting Hill; all the guests had dressed up to the nines, and arrived clutching bouquets.

Ushered into the gym-sized dining room, they were a tad surprised to find a takeaway in its aluminium containers, sitting in the middle of the candelabra-bedecked, mahogany table. Another friend went to a dinner party hosted by a super-stressed couple with City salaries. An hour into the meal, the hostess fell asleep in her chair.

Can it have come to this? Will this seething pit of social/sexual tension, burned main courses and excessive drinking really become a thing of the past? We set out to put the gloomy prognosis to the test.

As the third member of a trio of dinner-party hosts who threw open their doors, I prepared a feast from scratch. Over in Primrose Hill, PR Meena Khera was answering the door to caterers. And across the Thames in Lambeth, editor Robert Johnston was unpacking his M&S prepared food. I set off to shop.

I suppose the fact that tasks which were once second nature - planning the menu, sourcing the ingredients, polishing the glasses etc - now felt both unfamiliar and laborious indicates the doom merchants may be right.

And to think I used to be a natural: the groaning chopping board and a kitchen full of well-oiled guests were mainstays of my domestic life, even after a vicious day at the office.

Now it all seems like a lot of fuss about nothing. Clare, a publisher friend, thinks the rules have changed. "Flash entertaining is out," she says. "These days it's about downsizing." But serving up M&S with all the cartons on show is simply inverted snobbery. It's just as ostentatious as a six-course banquet.

She calls this new concept the " antidinner party". "All the effort I used to put into cooking now goes into showing people that I went to no trouble at all." As I put on my pinny, Clare's words echoed in my head. While Khera's guests quaffed champagne as the caterers busied themselves, and Johnston's friends were catching up on gossip, I was in the kitchen chopping radishes.

"You slave away for hours making something that's demolished in five minutes," says Johnston. "Life's too short." But if flash is out, where does that leave the likes of Khera, paying £100 a head?

She loved it: "I came in to find my table set and laid." Others had reservations. My music-biz friend Emma is one. "It's worse than the old-fashioned dinner party," she snorts. "Its sole purpose is to say,'Look how rich and busy I am'."

And my verdict? Well, at midnight, as I headed to the kitchen for two hours of clearing up, I knew my days at the chopping board were over. It's cartons every time for me. At a push, I'll stretch to a takeaway.

Home-cooked

Writer Dan Cairns cooked for a dinner party at his Stoke Newington home.

Who came: Dan Cairns's wife Bridget, an illustrator; Dominic Coiffait, MD of a textiledesign company; Helen Rawlinson, interiorproducts designer, and her boyfriend Nigel Desmond, composer; Jacquie Goacher, corporate PR consultant.

Menu: grated root vegetables and a'oli; whole barbecued wild salmon with crushed herb potatoes and a salad of beans with mint and garlic; raspberry tart and ice cream.

Conversation: romance, career aspirations and artistic creativity, and the likely realisation of any of these; Cuba; the state of the pop charts; Will Young; whether we should open another bottle.

Alcohol: one bottle of champagne, one red wine, four white.

Carriages at: midnight. Cost: £78.46 food; £54.96 drink.

Host's verdict: "At just over £20 a head, the evening was almost a bargain. But it was exhausting. However good the company and appreciative the comments, I was still in a bad mood from shopping, and you're left with a mountain of clearing up."

Would you do it again? "Never - well, perhaps on a weekend, and only if I had lots of spare time to plan ahead."

Ready-made

Editor Robert Johnston gave a dinner party at his Kennington home and bought all the food at Marks and Spencer

Who came: Catherine Baudrand, health editor, and her husband Vincent Gillet, brand manager at Mo?t and Chandon; Kally Ellis, co-owner of the florist McQueen's, and her husband, Damian Kelleher, publisher.

Menu: smoked salmon on soda bread; pan-fried chicken in lemon and tarragon with new potatoes and green salad; summer berry fruit salad with cream.

Conversation: Catherine and Vincent's soon-to-be-born baby (briefly); gossip about work; mutual friends' disastrous relationships (or lack of them) and potential matchmaking; how much they hate Tim from Big Brother.

Alcohol: one bottle of champagne, one white wine, two red.

Carriages at: midnight.

Cost: food £56, wine £44.

Host's verdict: "A great success, especially as both couples had never met; and only £20 a head. The M&S shop meant everything was really easy (and delicious), although next time I will have to remember to buy some soft drinks if pregnant women are coming.

The only downside is that I wish I had remembered that I can't drink gallons of coffee at night any more (due to great age), as I was still awake at 4am having personally demolished an entire cafetiëre."

Would you do it again? "Definitely. Far quicker and easier than cooking from scratch; nobody seemed to mind it was M&S.

Catered

Meena Khera, PR for Jude Law and Aveda, got in caterers for a dinner party at her Primrose Hill home

Who came: George Hammer - MD of Aveda and Mr Mascara; Lucy Halperin, owner of Joie, a fashionable US denim company; Jamie Cotter-Craig, co-owner of a production company; Lisa Eastwood and Lisa Lee, owners of Tann Rokka furniture store in Primrose Hill.

Menu: tomato consommÈ; Thai-style beef salad; confit of salmon cooked in duck fat, king scallops, baby fennel and beurre blanc; ginger and lemon sorbet; caramelised bananas with vanilla crËme fr?iche.

Conversation: Meena's new home; the beauty business; gossip about Primrose Hill; celebrities, Big Brother.

Alcohol: two bottles of champagne, three white wine, three red.

Carriages: at 1am.

Cost: £100 a head.

Host's verdict: "It was great to come home and find the table laid, and the food was really adventurous. I would never have been able to cook what was on the menu, and anyway I don't have time. All my guests felt special (most business people get a bit blasÈ about restaurants). The waiter was very handsome, and even did all the washing up."

Would you do it again? "It was a real treat, but no, it was too expensive."

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