Names and Identities Have Been Changed to Protect the Hosts

One of two scenarios usually unfolds when I go to a dinner party:

1. The host knows me and panics, checking in with me constantly about the menu and making sure that I eat/like everything.

2. The host doesn’t know me. Once we’re all seated at the table, someone will inevitably ask what I do, and then, due to a battery of questions, a good 20 minutes passes during which I am unable to get more than a couple of bites in. And the host freaks right out: Why didn’t someone tell me a critic was coming?

I am not a picky eater (in this job, you can’t afford to be) or a food snob – I love meatloaf as much as, if not more than, scallops. But knowing that someone who eats and cooks a lot sends people into a John Waters-scale hysteria.

Having experienced this for years now, I have compiled the following list of rules that may help, should I, or another food writer/critic, be seated at your table:

1. Stick to what you know.

It’s one thing to try out a new dish on family members or your best friend – they love you despite your occasional failings. But it’s another to dust off your Thomas Keller or Charlie Trotter cookbooks and try something you’ve never made before.

If you make great lasagna or cook fish to perfection, serve that. Great simple food always wins over dull fancy food, whether you’re in someone’s home or at a restaurant.

2. Do NOT wait until your guests arrive to start cooking.

Like preparing for restaurant reviews, I do not eat before a dinner party. If I’m going somewhere just for cocktails or appetizers, I’ll have a little something at home beforehand to tide me over. For a dinner party, however, I fully expect to eat.

Like the timing of a restaurant meal, there is a certain rhythm and flow to a dinner party:

Greetings

Drinks

An amuse-bouche, perhaps? What about trying some of these appetizers?

Please come and have a seat  – dinner is ready.

Coffee? Dessert?

Good night

There should be a short interval between each of these – not two hours during which I keep drinking to stave off hunger while you try to figure out how long it takes to cook grouse and then I go home drunk and beyond starving. And not during which you ask me to come into the kitchen and stuff the capon that you haven’t even put into the oven yet.

And certainly not during which you ask me, while I still have my coat on, to make the handmade pasta while you work on the sauce from scratch.

However, should an accident occur in the kitchen and the meal is unfixable, I will absolutely try to help (though my own disasters at home never seem placated by my trying to fix them) and I always know a memorable restaurant nearby that will take a group of us at the last minute.

3. That doesn’t mean we don’t want to help.

I used to feel that when I threw a dinner party, I had do everything myself; I wouldn’t be a worthy host otherwise. But one party in 2000 taught me that I couldn’t be more wrong.

At the time, I lived in a wonderful old apartment above an antique store. It had a long hallway; the kitchen was at one end and the living room/dining room was at the other, with a large bedroom and bathroom in between.

This meant that all the food had to be carried quite a way, which always added time to my prep and serving times. The dinner was in honour of a friend’s birthday, and though I had already put on a sequined dress and heels and the entree was cooking perfectly, I was behind on the appetizers.

Guests arrived and friends put coats in the closet or piled them on my bed. They poured wine and came into the kitchen for hugs and greetings, asking if they could help. No, I’m good, I’d say, smiling, not looking up from my platter of olive tarts. Okay, they said, and headed down the hall.

Kerry, my best friend at the time, saw that I still had two apps to finish and garnish. She had been coming in periodically to ask if she could help. When everyone else was in the living room, having drinks and apps, she walked into the kitchen with tears in her eyes. “Why won’t you let me help you?” she asked.

I realized in that moment that I always want to pitch in when I’m at a friend’s house (though only to a point – see item 2 above). It feels so good to help. And I had taken that away from her and my other guests.

Ever since then, I get people opening wine, slicing bread, stirring or whisking sauces or dressings and plating dishes; it makes the meal so much more celebratory, communal and memorable.

4. The food is secondary.

That is incredibly hard to write, considering that I am a food-obsessed writer who eats for a living and cooks the rest of the time and that I am writing this for a food magazine.

But it’s true.

Dinner parties were created so that ideas and opinions can be discovered and argued about. So people of varying backgrounds and industries can be brought together. So that we can create memories through the gift of a handcrafted meal.

The food is important, absolutely, but having a good time, I think, is the bigger goal of the evening.

5. Have a good time.

Look, I would be nervous if Anthony Bourdain, Kim Severson or David Chang were coming to dinner (you are all welcome any time), but I honestly wouldn’t try something fancy to impress them. I’d make the following:

Like most folks, I think a roast chicken done well is one of the best – and easiest – dishes in the world to prepare. And you can make almost any side with it and it will be a success. Here’s a foolproof recipe from Southern Living Comfort Food Cookbook that I use on casual occasions at home with my fella and when I want to impress a roomful of folks. It can be easily doubled or tripled, depending on the number of guests.

Lemon-Garlic Roast Chicken with Sauteed Green Beans Recipe