What are you up to next Saturday?” I asked a close friend recently, at the end of an evening. “Oh, er, nothing,” she replied, with a shifty air that implied she absolutely, definitely was up to something. “It’s, just, awkward, because…” she added, sounding slow and ominous like a creaky door in a horror movie. “OK. Jan and Mary are having a dinner party. I’m going with Mike, plus Sarah and Jack, Sam and Paula are going, and…”. And, well, I wasn’t invited, clearly. Pretty much an entire friendship circle was meeting, but because it was under the guise of the oh-so-special “dinner party”, it was just the couples and not the singletons who were asked. This wasn’t the first time I’ve been burned and spurned by my peers. There’s been a long-running war between couples and singletons played out over the dinner party scene for a while now. But this latest snub was the last straw. You can – with respect – shove your dinner parties (that I’m not invited to): dinner parties are dead anyway.
There’s an eerie stagnancy around the dinner party today. While we love to laugh at hilariously gross, over-the-top showstopper recipes from decades ago (such as the ones collected in Anna Pallai’s book, 70s Dinner Party), there was at least an undeniable vibrancy around the act of throwing a dinner party back then – even if you were being served jellied spam or a nest of frankfurters. While a Waitrose report this year claimed that a third of UK adults thought the term “dinner party” was old-fashioned, people still hold them, of course. But it’s telling that 2023 hasn’t produced an all-conquering and buzzy cookbook that simply everybody (dahling) is cooking from. Think of all those preserved lemons and sumac you ingested when Ottolenghi was a thing. Possibly the only significant development has been Nigella Lawson’s revelation that even she’s stopped having big, extravagant dinner parties and just serves roast chicken and a bowl of Twiglets instead of a starter.
