How to Host a Dinner Party (2 page)

Corey, it turns out, is a skilled alchemist and he is generous enough to share his formulas. This book is a detailed anthropological study of what makes a great social experience over food, combined with a practical how-to manual to create what could be some of the most rewarding nights of your life.

When you leave a place with Corey, whether it be a party, a movie theater, or a shopping trip, it’s always somewhat frightening how he breaks down, analyzes and picks apart what an experience was for him and why. (It was especially unpleasant after he read my last script and left no detail of his utter disdain unarticulated.) He has a ruthless, unblinking eye — which is incredibly helpful in book form. Like the man himself, this book is fun, engaging, hilarious, brutally honest, chock full of truths you don’t want to hear but should probably listen to, infuriating, and always entertaining.

You may feel you don’t need this advice on how to host a dinner party. Maybe you don’t. But I guarantee your guests will have a better time if you listen to it. Corey has the key to something ephemeral. He has broken it down and made something mysterious readable. Where we mortals see a mess of food and conversation, Corey sees a glowing map, a series of manageable steps — a recipe.

I hope you host more dinner parties. I hope this book makes you more excited, confident, and less afraid to do so. I know I myself feel much more assured in my ability to throw a great one after reading it. If more people gathered in environments where they were in great company, well fed, and well cared for, the world would be a much happier place.

F
ifteen minutes before the arrival of Ruth Reichl, on a cool spring day, I was sweating. Never before or since have I been as nervous as a cook, host, or interviewer. The butterflies in my stomach had butterflies in their stomachs.

At the time I was a restaurant critic for the
Toronto Star
, and Reichl was the editor of
Gourmet
. Before that she’d been the restaurant critic for the
New York Times
and the
L.A. Times
. Her third autobiographical book,
Garlic and Sapphires
, an account of how she disguised her identity to go undetected in New York’s best restaurants, had an influence on me and probably every food writer in North America that cannot be overestimated.

Why did I think it was a good idea to serve her lunch?

Just two years earlier I’d been a cook, desperate to transition out of a career I was painfully unqualified for. And that’s not my stab at false modesty. In any field, you can look around the room and tell who has the talent or drive to succeed above others, and who is treading water. I worked with some inspiring, tireless chefs, the type of men and women who would climb to the top of that particular mountain. I recognized that I didn’t have what they had.

One night when I was hosting dinner, my friend Lily Cho brought me Reichl’s book
Tender to the Bone
instead of a bottle of wine. At the end of that evening, Lily and her then-boyfriend Jesse Brown suggested that I should become a professional dinner party host. It was the sort of sweet but unhelpful advice a child might offer, like suggesting that I should become a candy taster or a hoverbike repairman.

I chugged back Reichl’s book, and then the next one and the next one. Beyond the flash of her spy-game disguises, what made an impression was the consideration that went into each review, the burden she expressed over judging strangers in such a public forum. I remember thinking that if I ever got to do that job, I would do it like her.

In an unlikely plot twist, I did get to do that job. And two years later, my hero’s publicist was asking me if I wanted to interview Reichl, who had a new book coming out. In situations like this, you get about thirty to sixty minutes with the interview subject, usually in a hotel room, with a queue of other newspaper writers waiting their turn. When it’s a food personality, you’re expected to drag them to your favourite restaurant or café, as if they weren’t exhausted with the triteness of being used as a prop.

Everyone had a suggestion about where to take Reichl for lunch, the soundness of trying to impress her with opulence weighed against the street cred of showing her some dingy Chinatown hole. Lily told me I should make lunch for Reichl. It was a fantastic idea — and it terrified me. Reichl was like Batman, and I was the kid with the towel tied around his neck to look like a cape. Frightened enough of interviewing a living legend, I didn’t need to add cooking performance anxiety.

But I put myself in my guest’s shoes. As a restaurant critic you’re not allowed to complain about your work because it is the best job ever. But what most people don’t know is that most restaurants are terrible and eating expensive, rich food gets tiring. Often you just want a simple sandwich.

So I made us GLT (guanciale, lettuce, and tomato) sandwiches. This was a valuable lesson for later. When you really need to impress someone, choose the simplest thing and make it well.

Reichl turned out to be everything I’d hoped: gracious, thoughtful (she walked over and joined me at the counter as I assembled our sandwiches), funny, and candid. She helped make it feel less like an interview and more like two old friends having lunch, asking where I’d gotten the bread, the guanciale, where the tomatoes were grown, if I’d made my own aioli (phew, I had).

Since I was on deadline, the interview was turned around quickly. But once I was done with it I still had that performance high, so I wrote a blog post about how it felt to cook for my idol. Six months later my boss called me into her office.

“Remember the interview you did with Ruth Reichl?” she asked. “I’m not saying it wasn’t good.” I didn’t like where this was going.

“But the blog post you wrote,” she continued, “about what you’d cooked and why was better.” She had an idea. “Do you think you could do that every week?”

And that’s how I became a professional dinner party host.

If reviewing restaurants for a living had taught me one thing, it’s that you should eat at home. I adore restaurants. But the good ones are few. And the most transcendent experiences, the dazzle of brilliant food, the pampering of efficient service will never trump the joyful intimacy of the dinner party.

No matter how much we drink at home, we will never face the sticker shock of a bill. We can be as loud as we wish. There is no one waiting at the door, hungrily, for our table.

Having cooked for six years and having hosted many successful dinner parties, I thought I knew what I was doing. But I didn’t. Like most people, I figured that a dinner party was a matter of inviting a bunch of people and serving them food. The intricacies of social balance, the smoothness of service, were beyond my thinking at the time. The guests, I figured, could sort that out.

When I’d interviewed Reichl, I hadn’t even thought to bring her a glass of water until she asked for one — such an obvious thing.

In the beginning, I invited guests who were completely incompatible. I tried to impress people. I asked for feedback at the table. It was a year before I bought wineglasses or matching plates. It was two years until I bought cloth napkins or a proper dining-room table. But week by week, with the mandate to interview guests over dinner, I kept building on what I’d learned. I discovered the subtleties of what people needed from me as a host. I figured out what space I had to experiment, and where and when in the meal I needed a proven hit.

Every week was someone and something new. It may seem Nixonian, but for the purpose of writing my column, I’ve recorded every one of these dinners. In listening to and transcribing these conversations — with politicians, artists, academics, monkeys, librarians, chefs, fishmongers, butchers, competitive barbecuers, dogwalkers, sommeliers, cops, lawyers, psychologists, writers, activists, a spy, two alleged terrorists, a forager, a rabbi, an acupuncturist, a high-rise window washer, a comic book talent scout, an economist, a drug addict, a mayor, and a world poker champion — I am able to hear what went right or wrong at the dinner table, and make notes for improvement.

I learned that the golden rule for dinner parties supersedes the original golden rule.

As tempting as it is to be sidetracked by the soufflé that didn’t rise, the person who came thirty minutes late, the passive-aggressive text from your intern, or the corked bottle of Pinot Noir, those are all distractions. Your goal is to ensure that your guests enjoy themselves — not that they be impressed by your cooking or envious of your home.

Every dinner, every guest, is different, requiring and deserving of thoughtful attention. Our task is to make them comfortable. This is why we take their coat, get them a drink, introduce them to new people, inquire about their work, their family, their renovations. But the familiarity, the mundane predictability of these topics, should usher us to move as quickly as possible past work, the weather, vacation plans. Dinner has struck gold when guests can argue respectfully about politics and race while still reaching for one last spoonful of cassoulet. Most guests, even those who seemed like they came only to appease their spouse (and these are the worst guests of all, as we shall discuss in Chapter One), will eventually relax. You can see this in their posture, the openness of their dialogue. It can happen in five minutes or an hour. Our challenge as hosts, and our talent, if we can find it, is to shorten this time frame.

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to spend a lot of money on a dinner party. And you don’t need to be a great cook either. What you need to be is a great friend and a better planner.

Not long ago I found myself in Lily’s home, this time with her husband, Zach. They’d just hosted a dinner party and had asked me to stay for a late-night drink. These are people with a lot of education and accomplishments between them, strong cooking skills, and no lack of thoughtfulness. And yet they had pre-plated the salads a half-hour before anyone sat down. When they’d asked me if that was a bad idea, I started to explain what I thought was relatively common sense — that an acidic salad dressing starts to corrode lettuce as soon as it makes contact, that assembling a salad is to be done at the absolute last minute. When they asked if I had any other tips, I started talking and found twenty minutes had gone by, with still more to say, when Lily interjected to tell me, in a maternal tone, that I needed to write a book.

She was right. After you’ve hosted more than 150 dinner parties, after you’ve done anything that many times, much of it seems like common sense. But that’s the deception of experience.

Most people would like to host a dinner party but are afraid. Or they have misplaced confidence and subject friends to their attempts at reproducing the complicated recipes of celebrity chefs. Worse, many have been led to believe, by television, that hosting is a competition.

This book aims to guide readers through everything they need to know about hosting, an experience that should be more fun and less stressful. It will explain why we like to gather for dinner, when we should host, whom we should invite, what we should cook, and how we should cook it in a way that doesn’t make us cry.

Having organized what I’ve learned into ten chapters, I think you can become a great host without doing it as many times as I have. After all, you have the advantage of cooking only for friends rather than strangers.

If I could be anywhere, I wouldn’t be lying on a beach or hiking through the rainforests. I would be at the dinner table with friends.