Until a few months ago, the thought of hosting a dinner party filled me with dread.
I was convinced that to invite people to dine in my home, the space needed to be sparkling clean. The meal needed to look as good as it tasted. The experience needed to be worth their while. Cue the anxiety spiral: Can my tiny living room accommodate all those guests? Will they be put off by my heavy-handed use of spices? Will anyone actually find this fun?
Whatever the reason, the standard I was measuring myself against was perfection.
It wasn’t just me. At least in my experience, people my age just didn’t throw dinner parties. When I shared this observation with friends and experts, they mostly agreed: Hosting seems like a lot of work and pressure.
Blame the themed gatherings with printed menus, elaborate tablescapes and decorative ice cubes that I see all over Instagram and TikTok. Or the rise of foodie culture, accelerated by Bon Appétit’s once-beloved YouTube channel that encouraged my generation to strive for epicurean flare at home.
You could even trace it back to Martha Stewart, whose homemaking empire in the ‘80s and ‘90s ushered in an ethos of unapologetic extravagance and effort.
It was simpler just to opt out.
For a long time, I did. It was more convenient to meet up at a restaurant or bar, where everyone could order exactly what they wanted and no one person shouldered the burden of cooking, cleaning and entertaining. We’d convene at an agreed-upon establishment for an hour or so, split the bill and go our separate ways. Easy. Fair. Stress-free.
But coming off years of relative social isolation brought on by the pandemic, these kinds of interactions started to feel impersonal and, ultimately, unfulfilling. The more fleeting that meaningful connection felt, the more I craved it.
Earlier this year, I faced my hosting anxiety in an attempt to fill that void. My husband and I hosted eight or so guests at our apartment one evening for a meal that we (mostly) cooked ourselves.
While chopping what felt like a never-ending amount of onions and constantly bumping into each other in our cramped kitchen, I questioned why I willingly brought this upon myself. But after our guests tucked into a few helpings and the room settled into a comfortable rhythm of conversation and laughter, the answer became clear.
The act of hosting others in our home created an intimacy that meeting at a restaurant or park couldn’t. It felt gratifying to bring people together for no particular occasion, to nourish them through cooking and to share our abundance.
Now, I’ve become something of a dinner party evangelist.
The rise and fall of the dinner party
Humans have been breaking bread together for centuries, but dinner parties — those elegant gatherings with multiple courses, fine china and implied formalities — grew more widespread in the mid-20th century with the expansion of the American middle class, says Alice Julier, a sociologist and food studies professor at Chatham University.
As home ownership and wages surged between 1940 and 1960, more Americans (almost entirely White Americans) had the space and the means to host gatherings that were once the domain of the wealthy elite. Julier describes these affairs as painstaking productions that also functioned to show off a person’s class status.
“It’s about this participation in material culture in America, as much as it is about participation in culinary and hospitality (culture),” she says.
In other words, hosting was not for the fainthearted.
New York socialite Emily Post, in her 1922 book “Etiquette,” put it this way: “One thing is certain, no novice should ever begin her social career by attempting a formal dinner, any more than a pupil swimmer, upon being able to take three strokes alone, should attempt to swim three miles out to sea. The former will as surely drown as the latter.”
Though early soirées relied on domestic help, the era of the idealized housewife shifted the bulk of that labor to women. Being able to produce such an intricate affair — from the decorating to the cooking to the conversation — was seen as an accomplishment at the time, per Julier.
Over the next several decades, women entered the workforce at a rapid pace, leading to the decline of the formal dinner party, Julier says. At the same time, restaurants, takeout and delivery became more accessible, creating a cultural revolution of eating out.
Today, by several accounts, the dinner party is all but dead.
Young people are seemingly too busy, too burnt out or too broke to bother. Their homes no longer have formal dining rooms, and they move around too often to hang onto the family china. Many of them live alone.
The pandemic dealt another blow, diminishing our desire and stamina for socializing. Home has become a safe place to unwind on the couch after a long day, not to entertain others. Outside of the holidays, at least in my circles and in those of the people I spoke to, it feels rare to go to someone’s house for a meal that they cooked themselves.
While a lack of money, time and space are legitimate obstacles for some people, Dhanajay Jagannathan suspects the real reason for the dinner party’s apparent decline is deeper than that.
Jagannathan, an assistant professor of philosophy at Columbia University who reflected on these informal gatherings in an essay earlier this year, identifies three key ingredients needed for this particular social event: hospitality, conviviality and attention. It’s this last ingredient, he writes, that is deficient in contemporary society.
There are an endless number of demands on our time and attention today, and it feels increasingly difficult to pull ourselves away from those obligations. There’s work to be done, emails to be answered and extracurricular activities to shuffle your kid to. When we’re finally through, all we want to do is curl up on the couch and binge episodes of the latest offering from Netflix while mindlessly scrolling on our phones. Plus, being able to keep up with the lives of others through their social media posts has instilled in us a false sense of connectedness.
Jagannathan told me anecdotally that some well-meaning hosts have given up after one too many occasions of people flaking at the last minute. A dinner party, whether you’re attending or throwing it, requires you to be “on” and fully engaged for a sustained length of time. In our modern era, that willingness to commit and be present feels ever elusive.
“Reflecting on the pandemic, there are habits and skills of social life, and we all got a bit rusty when we were more distant from each other,” he adds.
Letting go of perfection is key
Perhaps it’s no coincidence then that we’re lonelier than before.
One in five US adults reported feeling lonely “a lot of the day yesterday,” according to a Gallup survey released in October. US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy identified loneliness as a public health epidemic last year and has made the issue one of his top priorities while in office.
His latest prescription: Dinner parties — or more broadly, gathering around food.
As part of Murthy’s campaign against social isolation, his office recently released a booklet titled “Recipes for Connection,” filled with ideas and tips to ease anxieties around hosting a gathering. Nervous about extending invites? There are scripts for that. Worried you can’t do it alone? Co-host with a friend or turn it into a potluck. Stressed about the finances? Keep it simple and think about what you can make with ingredients in your pantry.
The booklet has also inspired a private initiative called Project Gather, which aims in 2025 to foster connection and build community through food.
Turns out I’m not alone in hankering for more thoughtful interactions. Since the pandemic, there’s been a growing appetite for intentional gatherings, including for the dinner party. Akilah Releford Gould, a 28-year-old who offers hosting advice and tips on TikTok, says she receives thousands of messages from people who want to host but don’t know where to begin.
“They associate hosting with this Martha Stewart-level production,” she adds.
But it doesn’t have to be. If anything, letting go of this ideal of perfection is key.
Kim Roberts, a 36-year-old who runs a blog called Feed My Friends, fell into a similar trap when she first started hosting. She’d spend money she didn’t have on fancy ingredients and go overboard cleaning her home, only to find that she wasn’t really enjoying herself. When she finally took the pressure off and redirected her energy toward bringing people together, it made for a better experience.
“At the end of the day, people don’t really care about how clean (your home is) or how fancy the food is that you serve at a dinner party,” Roberts says. “People remember experiences, not material things.”
Having kids has also relaxed her expectations — with little ones roaming around, she’s accepted that she’ll inevitably get interrupted mid-sentence and never finish what she was talking about. But she still makes the time to cook and bring people together in more manageable ways because of the connections it cultivates.
Roberts’ account reminded me of the role that the dinner party played in my own upbringing.
My Punjabi immigrant parents routinely hosted people at our home throughout my childhood, whether it was one person spontaneously dropping by for dinner or larger gatherings that involved a day or two of preparation. Then relative newcomers to the rural Kentucky town where we lived, hosting and attending dinner parties was how they built relationships and community.
These dinner parties were decidedly unstuffy. They cooked generous amounts of traditional Punjabi dishes, but they weren’t thinking about how well the dish would photograph or stressing about designing the perfect tablescape. It was implicit that kids, visiting relatives and friends of friends were welcome, too. (You could call it the immigrant precursor to the low-key approach now championed by the chef and internet personality Alison Roman.)
My mother would be the first to admit that hosting even these simpler gatherings was far from effortless — the prepping and cooking was time-consuming, and I still remember our family of four scrambling to make the house look presentable before guests arrived.
But she and my father took on that effort because food and hospitality was how they showed care. The practice of eating together is even baked into our faith — Sikh religious services typically end in langar, a communal meal prepared by volunteers and open to all.
While having people over for a potluck or takeout has a time and place, there’s something special and sacred about the act of cooking for others. However simple the meal, sacrificing your time to make something with your hands for another person is a deeply intimate gesture.
“In the same way that dancing with someone tells you about them, eating the food that they prepared also tells me something about them that’s special and maybe can’t be communicated otherwise,” Jagannathan says.
Now that I’ve hosted (and others have hosted me), I agree.
My husband and I have thrown a few more dinner parties since, and each subsequent time has felt more personally rewarding. And in a heartening turn of events, our endeavors have set off a chain reaction.
My friend Stephanie Kariuki came to that first dinner party and another more recent gathering we held, and it got us talking about the intangible benefits of hosting. Though she shared many of my initial anxieties, she told me our conversations motivated her to host Friendsgiving at her apartment a few weeks ago — an evening that left my belly full of delicious, home-cooked food and my heart full from her generosity and the riotous laughter that permeated her home.
Afterwards, I asked Stephanie if she would do it again.
Yes, definitely, she responded. Hosting a dinner party proved really fulfilling, and gathering her friends in one place reminded her that she had a community.
Still, there was a caveat.
“I would definitely do it with less pressure on myself,” she added.
My feelings exactly. Of course hosting a dinner party when you’re not a seasoned cook, when your apartment lacks a dishwasher and when you’re juggling a full-time job isn’t easy. But few things worthwhile ever are.
At our first dinner party earlier this year, no one seemed to notice that we didn’t dust the baseboards, nor did they seem bothered that the potatoes in my aloo gobi came out a little on the mushy side.
Really, they just seemed happy to be welcomed in — and I felt happy to have them.
