The Dinner Party Is Back, and It's Nothing Like You Remember

At some point in the past decade, the dinner party became a performance. You were expected to produce three courses of food you had spent two days sourcing and six hours cooking, while simultaneously appearing effortless, well-dressed and delighted to see everyone. The pressure was enormous. A lot of people stopped hosting altogether.

What's happened since is genuinely interesting. The dinner party has come back, but it has come back entirely stripped of that pressure. The new version is looser, more honest and considerably more fun.

Sharing food from the middle of the table, it turns out, makes people more relaxed than individual plated courses.

The key shift is in format. Shared plates replaced the formal three-course structure at some point around 2018 and have not looked back.  It lowers the stakes. Nobody is sitting in front of their own dish being judged by how much they eat or don't eat. Everyone is just reaching.

The menus have changed too. A decade ago, hosting meant showing off. Now it means cooking what you are actually good at. The most celebrated hosts are the ones who have stopped trying to impress and started trying to feed people properly. A very good roast chicken. A really excellent pasta. Bread that someone made. These things are more welcome than a technically complex dish that required everything to happen at exactly the right moment.

The other change is in who comes. The formal dinner party had a list. Eight people, carefully considered, seated with a plan. The new version is often more fluid. People arrive at different times. Someone brings someone else. The table is longer than it needs to be and there is always enough food because the shopping was done with exactly this sort of chaos in mind.