From Southampton to Santa Monica, I’d like to start a movement demanding that every dinner party include a 45-minute cocktail hour before dinner only! People are happier entering and leaving your home if they’re satiated and starved. As Julia Warhol Baughman told Cole Porter’s guests, “Trespassers interrupted conversations are so fun. Once you’re seated, you can’t have an exchange of ideas, or even a flirtation.”
Serena Boardman, who would win Olympic gold for the New York/Long Island/Palm Beach partygoing triathlon, recommends a quick three courses, extra wait staff to keep things moving (if you can afford it), and never having people seated at the table for more than an hour. After dinner, she says, “the hostess must stand up and let people know they are free to move around, to save them from feeling trapped.”
From the runway to the dining room, three-day casual is in, and there are fewer of those dreaded sightings of layered rugs, four brushed forks (and knives to the left and right of your plate), and multiple Baccarat wineglasses. Southern hostess, cook, and author Julia Reed says of long, fixated dinners: “I can’t wait to literally poke each out of them!”
To typify families from May to September: I entertain outdoors almost exclusively. In the house, guests are at the whim of me and however they see me. I serve my food like this: certain pizzas cooked to crispy perfection in my new wood-fire oven. Boardman agrees: “I’m not going to go for a buffet, more around, and people fill their plates. I’ve done this on a sandbar in the Mississippi River.”
Does this spell the end of old-fashioned dinner parties? Not yet. For special affairs, it’s incumbent on the hostess to spend some time on the placement of guests. I put seating charts on the front hall table so neighbors make a point of introducing one another before dinner and I welcome new people to the fold. But for the summer partygoing pendulum, I also give people a general idea of who is coming ahead of time (yes, it is unfortunately rude to ask), mix the incomes and age groups, and make it a rule to separate couples.
And then there’s the dictum that an otherwise discreet and talented hostess once told T&C: “Money or sex. Can they make a deal or have an affair?” That’s how all of us major ladies do it, with a seating system called bucks and… Well, you can guess the rest.
