I was mixing up some French 75s, setting up the stereo, zhuzhing my hair and whacking a camembert into the oven when I heard the news the dinner party was dead. Perhaps there and then I should have taken the prosecco off ice and told my friends not to bother coming over but instead I decided to crack on with it — because, despite a new survey claiming 80 per cent of Brits now consider the “dinner party” old hat, I don’t believe a word of it. Instead, rather than kill it off, I think we’ve reinvented it.
Some of the findings in the survey, commissioned by kitchen appliance company Stoves did ring true. Of 2,000 respondents, 90 per cent said they didn’t expect to have their host to “slave away” in the kitchen and would be happy to go to dinner at a friend’s house and find a ready meal dished up, while 70 per cent admitted they wouldn’t bother dressing for dinner, preferring to wear their “comfiest” clothes. Still, if dinner parties have become less stuffy that’s a good thing, it’s because now we care more about having fun and less about whether our host’s soufflé has risen properly.
