How to Host a Dinner Party (17 page)

Fresh herbs are a great way to add a light accent to heavy food. A link of braised beef short rib suddenly becomes a dish when it’s topped with a few deep-fried garlic chips, some thyme leaves, and a spoonful of the reduced braising liquid.

A taco jammed with carnitas is delicious, but it comes alive when you add pickled onions and sour cream.

For colour, adding a little green or orange is something you might consider in the menu stage, choosing a different-coloured root vegetable, bean, or herb. What you want to avoid is a monochromatic plate, such as the whiteness of steamed grouper with rice and parsnips. Coloured oils — chili oil or pesto — have their place. Just keep them to a minimum, and don’t use them to do the zigzag across the plate.

Remember that oils, even if they’ve been emulsified with parsley, will bleed. As they sit on the plate, the solids and liquids begin to separate, so they should be the last thing that goes on the plate.

THE SERVICE

 
 If you’ve made something special to accommodate a guest’s dietary restrictions, serve that guest first. He or she will have a moment to feel special, rather than waiting at the back of the gluten bus.

Forget the formality of serving from the left. When placing food on the table, just aim to serve around guests. If two people are talking, don’t lean in between them. Better to reach around them. Serve on the other side, unless, as previously suggested, you want to cut off their conversation so you can introduce your dish.

Whether the food is plated or family style, unless all dishes are on the table at once, you are serving a coursed meal, so there should probably be new plates and cutlery for each round.

When guests are eating tuna tartare with roasted beets, taking a pause, then eating rapini with pecorino Crotanese (don’t tell me this sounds too fancy unless you have never put cheddar on top of broccoli), they should have fresh utensils. I’m not saying that people will be offended if you don’t replace the cutlery for each course. In fact, some people will think, or even say, that it’s not necessary, or that it’s too chi-chi. But the bottom line is that no one wants to eat cheese off of a fork that smells like fish.

Do not rush the courses. Allow people time to breathe. Wait until everyone is done to clear plates, and even then give it a minute — don’t spring into action the second the last guest puts down his or her fork. And do not clear plates until everyone has finished. In restaurants, this rule drives servers and cooks crazy. The kitchen is waiting for the signal to fire (start cooking) the next course. If they start too soon, the third course could be ready while the second course is still on the table.

But if all plates but one are cleared, that one person now feels rushed. While this internal logic may seem like common sense to the guest, I’ve seen a large table’s tasting menu held up as one woman takes ten minutes to finally consume her last two spoonfuls of soup. This is where that server phrase “You still working on that?” comes from. They don’t want to be pushy. They just need to know if you’re done or not. Observation and body language usually communicate this. Guests will push a plate away, fold their arms, or balance fork and knife at the five o’clock position of their plate. But sometimes a guest likes to hold a fork indefinitely, like a drumstick or cigarette, sending mixed signals. Sometimes one has to ask.

I do the same thing in my home. Regular guests Lily and Zach eat at radically different paces. Zach can clean his plate and wipe it of sauce while Lily is still working her way through a spear of asparagus as if it were a T-bone. Over time, I’ve discovered a sort of marital osmosis, in which couples either needle each other about eating faster or slower, or actually eat off each other’s plates, equalizing their rate of consumption.

If you are waiting for someone to finish, you can get started on some elements of the next course in the kitchen, such as slowly warming things up, counting out plates, or picking some fresh herbs. You can also wipe down the table. This is another restaurant trick that is pragmatically honest (if the table is dirty) but it also sends a non-confrontational message to that last, slowpoke eater.

Either way, this isn’t a restaurant. The nice thing about being a friend instead of a servant is that we can say, “Either finish your story about your neighbour’s poorly paved driveway or finish your last bite of asparagus, but stop trying to do both.”

Once the lingerer has eaten the last mouthful, get those plates off the table. It is not such a huge amount of work to wash cutlery in between courses as well. Unless you have an industrial restaurant dishwasher in your home, which wishes a cycle in about two minutes, this means (gasp) washing by hand.

Now is the time to cash that investment you made earlier. Let your Helping Hands do rounds of dishes. Ask only those who have already volunteered, but expect others to volunteer as well, particularly if you make a big show of thanking the first person who helped out. Often, at the end of a great meal, those who didn’t help out will squabble over the right to wash dishes, not wanting to be remembered as the only person who didn’t pitch in.

None of this is to say that guests should be expected to help out. There are guests who believe that it would be an effrontery to be asked to wash dishes, and they are within their rights. Just don’t waste the resources of volunteer labour.

THE WATER

 
 From the moment they take a seat at the table, guests should never be without water. As we learned in junior high health class, alcohol is a diuretic, meaning that it causes our body to lose water. Later in life, we learned that it is not awesome to be out-of-control drunk. And it is even less awesome still to wake up with a hangover.

Keep your guests hydrated. Don’t wait until people are drunk to offer them water. If you do, expect them to ask, “What? You think I’m drunk?”

It’s nice to constantly keep guests’ glasses filled with water, but it’s also a lot of unnecessary work. In the last five years, most mid-range restaurants have adapted. It used to be that a server would spend a great deal of the evening filling water glasses. Around the time that it became very unfashionable to sell bottled water, restaurants started leaving bottles and jugs on the table, filled from the tap, filtered or not.

This is an easy and elegant step to take at home, and you don’t need to buy one more kitchen thing. The next time you finish a liquor bottle, if you like the shape, just clean off the labels and use it for water. Whisky bottles are usually clear and tend to have wider bases than wine bottles (and in my home are finished quite often), so they’re less likely to be knocked over. Lighter fluid will help remove any label adhesive. Keep two or three full bottles on hand so you can maintain a bottle on the table at all times. That way guests can help themselves.

If you walk around the table filling water, you’ll seem like a butler. Instead, every time you reach to fill your own glass, first fill those around you. When they’re full, pass the bottle down the table as a cue for others to help themselves. When it’s empty, bring a full one. This way, you’ll need to look after water (filling the bottles) only about once every hour.

THE DRINKING

 
 As discussed in Chapter Two, if you are a wine person, then you know which wines to serve and when. If one of your friends is a wine person, allow him or her to take over this role. Trust me, your friend will accept the invitation. I never met a wine person who didn’t want to drink, pour, and talk about wine, but such a person is not always available.

Your guests have brought you wine. Also, you have wine because, as stated, you are a grown-up. Which wine do you serve and which do you serve first? Know that you are under no moral obligation to serve the wine that your friends brought any more than if they brought you a book, you would have to read it right away. Over the course of the evening you will drink many bottles, so you’ll probably get to it.

A guest might make a passive-aggressive stink about you not serving his or her wine. “Was there something wrong with the Chardonnay we brought?” They are basically like the aunt who expects you to wear the ugly Christmas sweater she knitted. Open their wine and pour them a glass. Just don’t feel you have to drink it.

At some point in the evening you may have multiple bottles open. If you’re refilling a glass that isn’t empty, ask to make sure that you’re pouring the right one. “Are you drinking the Malbec or are you still on the Cab?” It’s pretty embarrassing to dump two wines together, but if you do, immediately take the glass away, rinse it, and pour a fresh one (unless the first wine was “pruno,” prison toilet wine, in which case you have improved its overall composition).

Sometimes I rinse glasses in between wines, but not always. I find that most sommeliers expect that only when they’re at a professional tasting, and the rest of the time they’re happy to relax about a few drops at the bottom of the glass. The exception would be in switching from red to white, in which case I’ll give it a rinse.

When you’re pouring, don’t fill the glasses more than a third. The wine needs oxygen to breathe. Hold the bottle by the base, not the neck. Finish the pour with a small twist, as you would with a spoonful of honey, to minimize the drip.

THE CONFRONTATION

I once had a hairdresser (I once had hair) who told me that she wouldn’t let clients talk about politics or religion. Well, at a dinner party, people should talk about politics and religion. They should kibbitz and raise their voices and use the parts of their brains not activated by awards shows and conference calls. We should challenge each other and not be afraid to disagree. No topic should be forbidden among adults, but steer clear of death and disease. Let’s not bring the room down.