When Nigella Lawson declared she rarely hosted extravagant dinner parties anymore, it was unfortunate timing. Just five days before I had hosted a Nigella-themed dinner party for my 25th birthday, complete with sexy wrap-dresses, saucy dishes, and chocolate mousses aplenty. It seemed as though whilst one generation was hanging up their boots, another generation was putting them on and drinking dirty martinis in them.
Dinner parties died a small death sometime during the past few decades. Everyone collectively decided it was all a bit much just to have your coworker pick at some chicken and ask about your landscaping plans. No one wanted to play hostess and for good reason. Dinner parties were dull, beige affairs; chicken casseroles, potatoes in indistinct gravy, lumpy cauliflower and cheese. Martha Stewart once suggested you should start to cook and prepare food at least a week in advance, which, no offence to Martha, is probably the same half-baked advice I’d dish out if I were also on house arrest for five months.
But now dinner parties are back from the depths of the freezer, enticing a whole other generation to their charms. Whilst millennials turned to eating out to socialise, Gen Z are ironing out their tablecloths (or fine, ordering them from Tik Tok Shop) and tying small bows around taper candlesticks for their nearest and dearest.
The new-age dinner party looks a little different though. Think plates laden with mushroom galettes and pomegranates, the it-girl fruit of the moment. Or plates abstained from entirely in favour of table-long grazing platters and butter boards. You’ll be sure to find some sort of tomato and burrata platter making the rounds (an overrated cheese enjoying its hopefully short-lived relevancy) and no salad would be complete without Olivia Wilde’s vinaigrette that, supposedly according to The Daily Mail, witnessed the spectacular breakdown of her marriage to Jason Sudekis and birth of her romance with Harry Styles. To finish, Nigel Slater’s Basque-stye cheesecake, of course.
In the past, dinner parties provided “an opportunity to demonstrate one’s upward mobility and social graces and to connect with people in a more opportunistic way. It was more networking than relaxing; people might have invited their bosses over for dinner, for instance,” Alissa Wilkinson writes for Bon Appetit. Whilst those wealth displays continue to a degree (have you seen the price of cauliflower these days?), the modern dinner party leans towards bringing friends and whānau together and sharing in abundance.
They’re often pot-luck affairs, or certainly more laissez-faire than our parents’ generation. No one particularly cares about napkins, although squiggly, colourful placemats seem to be making a comeback. Themes are encouraged, from ‘quiet luxury’ to ‘girl dinner.’ Long tables help to make the vibe luxurious and ambiguously European. But why are the youth flocking to flower arranging and focaccia?
The most obvious answer is that eating out is too expensive these days. I paid $25 for eggs on toast the other day and almost cried with regret. And that’s just brunch. Imagine a dinner out with drinks on top, maybe even an appetizer if you dare. It’s a no-brainer that things are not only cheaper at home, but more comfortable too. You can stay for hours, play your own music, and there are no queues for the bathroom.
Yet it’s still a bit of a hassle to have a bunch of people round at yours, especially if they’re making eyes at your stainless-steel sink, even more so when the houses are smaller and shittier than that of Nigella’s generation. Arguably, dinner parties symbolise adulthood without the need for conventional coming-of-age signifiers: buying a house, getting married, having kids — of all which Gen ‘s are forsaking or delaying in this current climate.
Behavioural analyst Nick Lising-White notes that “in the absence of traditional milestones of adulthood, hosting others not only satisfies the needs for community but it feels like the grown-up thing to do.” The modern-day dinner party says no, I don’t own this apartment, but I do own a Dutch oven and 20 tiny cake forks and isn’t that good enough? And reader, that kind of affirmation alone is worth the next-day cleanup. Made easier, even, if you have five additional flatmates to help.
Gen Z’s are also ditching the binge drinking behaviour that marked millennial socialising in favour of “Sunday resets” and Friday nights spent with skincare testers. Not surprising given their formative years were spent in a global pandemic. Therefore, when they do drink, it’s less likely to be at some dodgy bar or house party and more likely to be an intimate gathering with friends.
Thanks to increased hybrid working models, it’s easier than ever to throw something in the slow cooker, pick up a cheap bottle of rosë and you’ve got yourself a dinner party. It’s socialisation focused around food, with alcohol an afterthought rather than the main course.
Eating out has its downsides, especially when it comes to content creation. As more youth film and market their inner lives to an online audience, events such as dinner parties become occasions to broadcast your social currency. You can show off your cooking prowess, your outfit, your tablescaping skills, even just the fact that you have friends at all.
Let’s face it, you can’t really film in a restaurant — or more to the point, shouldn’t film in one. At a dinner party, you’re free to be on your phone to your heart’s content. Why not drop an affiliate link to your candlesticks at the same time? It doesn’t really matter if the carrots are overcooked or the sauce under seasoned. If the content looks good enough, then that’s good content. A visual feast rather than, you know, an actual one.
But if dinner parties died once, might they die again? Sure, but I doubt it. In this long, hot summer of late capitalism where trends last a blink of an eye, everything and nothing is in trend (apart from burrata which I’m telling you – its days are numbered). There’s no point worrying about which lettuce is a social faux pas and which pasta shape is buzzworthy because that idea will be out the window by Wednesday.
The ties have loosened, the rules have relaxed, so the masses can actually have fun with it – apart from the content creators, but then again, they’re never really having fun. You can try out that new “Marry Me Chicken” dish you’ve seen on Tik Tok, you can wear cowboy boots and dance to Kylie Minogue in the living room. No bosses to impress, just loved ones to cherish.
In the immortal words of author and dinner party goddess Nora Ephron: “What I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick,” she writes. “It’s a sure thing in a world where nothing is sure; it has a mathematical certainty in a world where those of us who long for some kind of certainty are forced to settle for crossword puzzles.”
We are a generation often adrift without housing security, job security, even climate security. But yet, after a night of spooning liquified creme brûlée onto my friends’ plates and pouring wine from silver foil goon bags, I can almost picture what our lives would be like at 40 or 45. Delicious, forever.
Caroline Moratti is the deputy editor of Your Home and Garden magazine. She’s the former editor of Massey University’s student magazine Massive and culture editor of Otago University’s Critic Te Arohi, covering everything from overworked RAs to booze reviews. She was a cooking columnist for years, worked as Recipe Editor of My Food Bag and her go-to dinner party dish is a bean bourguignon.
