on the dinner party

and its apparent decline

The death of the dinner party has been declared, repeatedly. Millennials don’t have money, napkins, or china, you see. Most recently, blame has been cast on the decline of the formal dining room. 

But all of these explanations are inadequate, individually and even taken together. It’s true that few people, especially of cash- and space-poor younger generations, are able to host a dinner party in the bourgeois postwar mold, with cutlery for every course. But the admittedly stodgy customs that attend that precise vision of the formal dinner party are not its essence.

There are three main ingredients that make a dinner party what it is: hospitality, conviviality, and attention. All three are within relatively easy reach of most people. The real reasons for the decline of the dinner party, must, therefore have to do with ways these ingredients have become scarcer in our lives. Let me take each of them in turn before returning to this question.

First, hospitality. A dinner party is not a potluck or a restaurant group meal: the host offers the meal at their home at a prescribed time. One could, of course, cater the food. But cooking offers a warmer mode of hospitality that is particularly appropriate for one’s intimates.  

Jules-Alexandre Grün, The Dinner Party (1911)

I will confess to my own prejudices here, as someone who grew up with wonderful home cooking – one of my mother’s many artistic gifts – and has become an avid cook himself in adulthood. I began cooking regularly in college and discovered that having people round for a meal was neither arduous nor even particularly expensive,  even on the limited funds I had. Of course, there is a suite of skills involved, from knowing your way around a grocery store to keeping your  kitchen organized to the food preparation and service itself. 

But even simple home cooking beats most meals out, especially for a vegetarian like me. The tricks that tend to make restaurant food appealing are superficial, even if all you focus on is gustatory delight. (At American restaurants, at least, the food is likely drowning in butter and salt.) More importantly, a meal served at home can operate as a mode of self-disclosure that surpasses taking someone to your favorite restaurant, not least since at home everyone eats the same food.

This idea of self-disclosure helps us see, more generally, what hospitality is and why it should matter to us. At home we are typically unguarded and perhaps even most ourselves. To invite someone to share your home and your table, then, is a way of offering yourself. 

The dinner party goes even further, insofar as it presupposes a multitude of guests, who on the appointed evening come together to create one version, one vision of what the host’s home can be. The guests too must have the virtue of hospitality, for this single virtue has two faces, each of which requires modes of receptivity as well as modes of self-offering.[1] (An underrated dimension of guest-hospitality is reliability, which seems to be diminishing in casual forms of socializing.)

In sum, in our openness to others, in the distinct form of love that hospitality is, we can come to be known and also come to know ourselves better.

That brings me to conviviality. A dinner party, of course, involves food and drink. But conversation at the table is their crown. The best dinner parties involve leisurely meals, the necessity of food transformed into an opportunity for sustained conversation and discussion. (I have found through experience that having four to six people at the table ensures that, nearly all the time, a single conversation prevails — a desideratum.) Some of this talk might be for those gathered to get to know one another, some might be catching up, and some might be devoted to inquiry and exploration of new topics. The relative freedom from external constraint in someone’s home allows conversation and meal to be paced to one another, something that is more difficult to sustain in a restaurant.

A certain caricature of the adult dinner party associates it with ponderous discussions of serious-seeming matters such as politics. (Most of what passes for political discussion these days is, sadly, deeply unserious.) But my own experience is simply that sharing a meal inspires curiosity. The food itself can be conversational fodder. From there the shared imagination of the table may venture forth.

A dinner party favors joy over somberness, playfulness over being staid. The sheer delight of companionship can prompt further delights. All my favorite dinner parties, those I have thrown and those I have attended as a guest, have been at least somewhat lighthearted, even silly. But lighthearted conversation can prepare us for weightier topics, and in some cases may lead directly to them. What is most important is always to “attend with the ear of your heart”.

Both hospitality and conviviality, then, draw on a common principle: discerning attention. At a dinner party, guests and host alike must draw a veil around their shared activity. In fact, it is not too much to say that the participants in a dinner party must sacralize the space within which it occurs.[2] That is the chief benefit of a formal dining room: to mark outwardly what we achieve inwardly.

My greatest deficit as a host, I fear, is that I tend to be so anxious to organize everything perfectly that I fail to pay due attention to the dinner party as it unfolds. In recent years, I have been trying consciously to work against this tendency, with my most effective technique being doing all or nearly all of the cooking ahead of time. I also try to remind myself that, in a way, a host must be a guest, too.[3] 

Apart perhaps from the cinema or the theater or the opera, we do not tend to devote ourselves for an entire evening to any one activity. But the dinner party demands this of us, though the rich variety of a convivial gathering hardly makes it a labor. Still, dinner parties differ from other sorts of Good Parties, where one may choose one’s particular route through an evening, for instance by arriving on the early or on the later side or by talking to some and not others of the other guests. The dinner party calls for a more coordinated mode of engagement with one another and, therefore, a more sustained form of attention.

Hospitality, conviviality, attention: of these, it is attention that is in shortest supply in our lives. So, if the dinner party really has declined, I submit we should look for the explanation here. 

When we socialize, we prefer to do it on our own terms, as with most other activities in modern life. A dinner party, meanwhile, calls us away from ourselves – and from the other demands of life, including those that intrude via the rectangular screens in our pockets and purses.

I do not mean to claim outright that smartphones have destroyed dinner parties, but there is perhaps some truth in the thought. I confess that my eye occasionally begins to twitch when I see a phone on the table at a private dinner, especially if I am the host, though I have never said something explicit on the subject to a guest, since that would inevitably be even ruder than any perceived transgression of the intimacy of the meal. 

The leisurely pace of a dinner party is also out of step with the ways we now tend to organize our time and attention, which perhaps exacerbates the sense of unease one might feel if they are unused to the practice.

Still, these are all just reasons for us to make the time for dinner parties more regularly. I regret that, for the three pre-pandemic years when I had a formal dining room in my New York City apartment, I used them all too seldom for festive meals. One of my abiding memories of those early weeks of staying-at-home in the Spring of 2020 is converting my long dining table to a Zoom teaching surface, the intimacy of meals exchanged for the new and cruel necessities of life during a pandemic.

Now, in a seemingly less suitable apartment, I try to have people round for dinner once a week or so. To circumvent the challenges of coordinating everyone’s schedules, I’ve chosen a particular night of the week and let it be known among our friends, particularly those who live nearby, that the door will be open. On some nights, it’s just us; on others, five or six more might come.

These gatherings, relatively informal, still imbue with a special significance the other meals in this home, even those I take alone. It is a joy to know that this dining table – like all else in life, really – is not simply my own.

---

[1] I normally avoid argument by etymology, but it may help to know that ‘guest’, ‘host’, and ‘hospitality’ are all cognate words, ultimately deriving from the same root.

[2] I take the idea that we sacralize – make sacred – space through joint attention from Paul Woodruff’s writing on theater, especially his 2008 book The Necessity of Theater: the Art of Watching and Being Watched, which I wrote about in my memorial essay for him.

[3] This idea has a rich theological significance, especially as it bears on the Eucharist, the meal that is the type of all others.