How to Host a Dinner Party (20 page)

If you have a friend whose opinion you really respect, ask him or her later, not in front of everyone. Send your friend an email. After the fact, honesty becomes a virtue again. While we’re on stage, we don’t pick the show apart.

Though if you are my friend Jesse Brown, you already know how your cooking was: too clovey.

ON INSISTENCE

Guests, you may wind up at the table of a host who demands that you criticize their food. They have watched too much make-believe cooking on television and they think that this drama is part of the evening. Hold your ground, as you would with a bear. Do not show signs of fear and do not try to run away from the conversation. Lie. Plenty of times I could’ve said, and meant, “The food was okay, but the company was fantastic.” But no one wants to hear that. They only want compliments. If they demand to know what you thought of a dish, it was great. If they get specific, asking about the leeks, then the leeks were the best part. If they want more, they can subpoena you. And talk to your lawyer.

The whole point of the evening is to enjoy each other’s company with the aid of good food and wine. But if we’re being honest, then sure, there’s a subtext of competition. All that stuff that I said doesn’t matter — the size of your home, the elegance of your stemware, the deliciousness of your food — does, in fact, matter, but it matters only to our egos, to the part of us that every bit of common sense and every spiritual belief system (expect maybe Objectivism) teaches us to rise above.

Though we try not to, we are keeping a running tab of how much everyone else earns, how well-behaved their children are, or how amusingly they tell a story. When we have people over to our homes, it can feel like show-and-tell day at the shrink’s office, time to feel good or bad about ourselves, our belongings, our charisma, our choices. The food we’ve cooked is a physical manifestation of all that.

But it’s not about us. Save that analysis for after the party, when you and your husband or wife are cleaning up. Your friends, on their way home, will be doing the same thing, analyzing what went right and what went wrong, while you, at home, are dissecting who was a good guest and who was a bad guest. For that moment, save your thoughts about how dry the potatoes were.

I have not always heeded my own advice, or perhaps I’ve just had to learn the hard way that no one really wants your opinion on his or her cooking. Though I used to get paid to write restaurant reviews, from time to time I’ve dished it out for free, with disastrous results. I offer these stories as a warning to travellers who may be foolish enough to tread this path with their friends.

One time I went to a new restaurant with a pal. We sat at the bar. I was friends with one of the servers and during each course, she came to ask what I thought. The bartender and one of the owners also made inquiries with each dish. I smiled and nodded. Truthfully, it was all quite good. During one dish I responded to the bartender that it needed salt. Soon the chef came to the table to ask me why I didn’t like the dish and then told me why I was wrong. “It’s a handmade tofu,” he explained, “and the subtlety would be ruined if seasoned like the rest of the dishes.” He walked away without saying goodbye. A week later a friend ate there and the staff asked her, “What’s with your asshole friend Corey?”

One time my friend Jesse was serving chile en nogada, a Mexican dish that he was excited about. He asked me how it tasted. I told him it was good, which it was. Again and again he asked, insisting that there must be something, some small area for improvement. I told him that it was a little clovey. “A little clovey?” he repeated, gazing back at me as if I’d desecrated his family’s tomb. In the years since, at every meal with Jesse, he has never failed to inquire if my food is too clovey.

Eventually it became a running gag. But at first it was a clear indication that, though he asked for feedback, he didn’t want to hear anything more than those other chefs did. “It’s delicious, chef,” is what we should say. “Your best work yet.”

THE PORTIONING

 
 If you reach a moment in your dinner party (or in your life, really) when your primary fear is that your guests may be too full, this is one of those good problems, like people who worry that they enjoy jogging too much. Congratulations, you’ve won life.

As we discussed in the menu planning stages, it is difficult to know how much to make. Don’t feel bad. The other day at the grocer’s I couldn’t help but overhear with two guys debating how many potatoes they needed for dinner. They were both professional cooks, planning a dinner party for a friend. They were comfortable with buying whole fish and butchering it for ceviche, or improvising dishes based on what they found at the market. One of them insisted on having one pound of potatoes per guest, which is a monstrous amount. Just know that even professionals have trouble guessing how much people will eat.

It is easy to know when people are full. They will emit sounds, possibly belch depending on your or their culture’s acceptance of that sort of thing, and say things like, “Whoa, there is more?” Watch and listen for these unsubtle signs. Do not force your guests to eat too much out of politeness.

It will happen in different stages with different guests because — and I’m going to state the obvious here — big people tend to eat more than little people. This isn’t always true, but you can usually bank on it. I have a couple of friends who are six feet five inches tall and I try to serve them the one piece of beef that’s bigger than the others or the extra potato. They’re the ones who finish first and look over their shoulders to see if there’s more. These people are the reason that you always make a little extra. When you see they’ve still got that hungry look on their face or (and I swear to you this happens all the time) are greedily eyeing their wife’s plate, surprise them with, “There’s more stuffing in the pan.” You will see them light up. Every guest deserves satisfaction.

In the menu planning stage, we introduced the idea of preparing a last course with a negotiable amount. Now it may be time to put this into effect. You’ve watched for the signs, seen guests leaning back, slapping their bellies, pushing their plates away. If you’ve got more food coming, you may need to call an audible. If I understand my football reference correctly (and I probably don’t), this is when the quarterback serves the wide receiver only half as much mashed potatoes as originally planned. Or is that lacrosse?

When they see you plating the last course, they’ll make more groaning sounds. Translation: “Dear host, please don’t be offended if we don’t finish this food. It’s not that we don’t like it, but we are very full.” But once they’ve seen the small amount you’ve plated, they will relax and discover that they do indeed have a little more space in their bellies. And of course, everyone miraculously has more room for desert.

Portioning is also what they call “a teachable moment,” albeit a small one. As you see guests getting full, take a moment to think of how much they’ve eaten. This will help you in future dinner parties. Once you’ve seen that threshold a number of times, you’ll grow comfortable in planning portions. Again, as Miyamoto says, “You must practise this. There is no other way.”

Let the unserved food cool before placing it in the fridge, but get it in there while it’s still on your mind. You don’t want to discover, after spending the rest of the evening eating dessert and drinking, that you’ve left the meat out for hours.

THE DESSERT

 
 We worry over dessert, yet rarely need to. In all likelihood, people are pretty full at the end of dinner. They should be. What most of us want is a bite or two of something chocolatey, so my first word on dessert is to caution against overdoing it. It’s heartbreaking to see a beautiful pie come out of the oven, the meringue top tinged with a little brown, when no one has any desire to eat it. I have a friend who loves to bake, but he also loves to cook rich, fatty food and insists on ladling out seconds. By dinner’s end, he’s stuffed us with brisket and bread, yet he’ll also make not just pie, but cake and cookies as well.

No one ever complains that there’s too much dessert, but we often feel bad if we don’t eat it. Sometimes, when full to bursting, we feel worse if we do. Filter this through the perspective of age as well. When I was twenty-five, I slept next to a drawer full of candy, which I would actually snack on during the night. But most of us, as we age, first start gaining weight, then start worrying, at the behest of doctors and spouses, about our hearts and all that stuff.

Because I host a dinner every week, and because I’m now older and metabolize sugar more slowly than I once did, I wish we could do away with dessert. However, whenever I think that, I remember that my guests do not attend a dinner party every week and that, as a guest in someone’s house, dessert is expected. They have worked hard all week and have earned their slice of pie.

Not only should you not serve too much dessert, you should not serve it too quickly. Allow guests time to digest their meal. Even if you’ve taken a more relaxed approach to the courses (reusing cutlery and plates), treat dessert as a separate act. Completely clear and wipe down the table. Expect people to help out at this point, if for no other reason than that they need to stand and stretch.

If you are offering tea or coffee, ask guests before you serve dessert. Some people need to have their coffee and cake at the same time and can become oddly unhinged if they are served a slice of cake and told that they’ll have to wait while coffee is brewing.

I don’t bake much. The whole process feels entirely different to me from cooking, but on occasion I’ll try out a recipe, during which time all electronic devices in the home must be turned off so I can completely focus on the printed word. Instead, I prefer to assign dessert to one of my guests. When I have a friend who likes to bake, then it’s an easy fit. This takes a load off the host and also provides an easy answer to “What can I bring?”

ON COFFEE

When I was a kid it was unthinkable to have a holiday dinner without coffee. My family didn’t drink much wine, but they stayed up late doing caffeine. At my grandmother’s for Rosh Hashanah, my aunt’s house for Passover, or our apartment for Hannukah (where my father didn’t even drink coffee), the meals were followed by a solicitation for drink orders, resulting in two batches of coffee — regular and decaf — being brewed, plus a pot of tea. No one drinks coffee after dinner anymore.