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Avoid My Dinner Party Planning Mistakes!The other night I co-hosted a dinner party with my dear friend Kevin. (Names changed to protect the innocent) We invited an equally dear mutual friend and partner to repay the wonderful hospitality we had received at their house. We also invited several other people, so the group was eight altogether. We planned for the dinner party to be a summer BBQ in Kevin’s beautiful and spacious backyard. Then we planned the menu as a committee. This is where we made our first mistake.We got carried away. We planned a large and complicated menu with far too much food, drink and general expense. We kind of egged each other on and got more and more grandiose.I know better, and so does he. We’re not novices at giving dinner parties. But we made some more pretty novice mistakes just the same. We made the pre-dinner cocktails too complicated.We offered martinis, daiquiris and an assortment of wine and beer.Getting ready for martinis and daiquiris was expensive and worrisome – and guess what everybody wanted? You guessed it – wine and beer! All our fussing with things like getting olives and toothpicks for the martinis, and buying a martini shaker went for nothing. Next, we made the appetizers too complicated.Here’s what we served:
Wow, then we served a super saladThe salad was super delicious, a pear/mesclun concoction.But the person who put it together spent 15 minutes in the kitchen between the appetizers and the main course. Delicious as it was, this recipe contributed to dinner party planning stress. Then we planned too many star recipes for the main courseInstead of choosing one or at most two star recipes for the main course, we planned a bunch of star dishes:
These dishes meant that somebody had to be at the BBQ tending the lamb chops, and somebody had to be in the kitchen preparing the last minute sauces. So it meant that no host was with the guests for long periods of time.
Next Mistake - We didn’t carry through with our plan of assigning the seatingEveryone was kind of sitting around the dining table talking and munching on the appetizers. But when dinner was ready, we should have said -“OK everybody, will you please …” and then assigned them seats. Instead, we had couples sitting beside each other, family members sitting beside each other, and people who didn’t really get along all that well next to each other. So conversation was not as lively and easy as it should have been. Altogether we left too much to the last minute.You can see from looking at the menu that too many things had to be done at the last minute. The glaze for the carrots, the Hollandaise sauce, putting the cream cheese on the pumpernickel and topping it with smoked salmon – well you get the picture.We won’t even talk about dessert, and the fancy specialty coffees we had on order. Sigh… So don’t make the mistakes we made.Take a lesson from our experience. You may know all the tricks and techniques for stress-free dinner parties, but you have to use them!
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