Alissa Wilkinson is a senior culture reporter at Vox and author of ‘Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living From Revolutionary Women,’ out June 28 from Broadleaf Books.
Photograph by Gado/Getty
Years ago, my friend Carey Wallace hosted a dinner party every Wednesday night in her little Brooklyn apartment that went by a comically simple moniker: Soup. “Are you going to Soup this week?” I’d ask a friend on the weekend. “See you at Soup!” we’d say when we bumped into someone at the grocery store.
The plan for every Soup was simple: eat soup. But that wasn’t its purpose—it was to make a new friend, to have a heated conversation about the news, to wash it all down with warm mush. There was always moody lighting, rich flavors, and delightful strangers. It provided something that’s become more elusive since the pandemic began: comfort.
Dinner parties offer a simple way to connect with others, and in my book, Salty, I took a similar joy in imagining being at a dinner party with nine historical women writers, artists, and thinkers. But historically, dinner parties haven’t always been about peace and joy. In fact, while people have always gathered to share meals, the dinner party once was a significant source of class anxiety.
After World War II, the rapidly expanding American middle class couldn’t necessarily afford household servants, but they could buy fancier things like china, according to sociologist Alice Julier, the author of Eating Together: Food, Friendship, and Inequality. Dinner parties provided an opportunity to demonstrate one’s upward mobility and social graces and to connect with people in a more opportunistic way. It was more networking than relaxing; people might have invited their bosses over for dinner, for instance. The motivations of a postwar dinner party were “very rooted in the Western social class model of aspiration,” Julier says.
But after the war, the middle class became more prosperous, and people’s reasons for inviting folks to dinner changed. In her research, Julier interviewed dozens of home cooks all over America, most of whom were people of color, and found that their notions of hospitality were all grounded in the same idea. “Every single person, no matter what they did, said it was about ‘making people comfortable,’” she says. “That’s not what [legendary etiquette expert] Emily Post meant when she talked about hospitality, and that, to me, is the key to the modern iteration. There are very few spaces left where we can have that kind of comfort with one another.”
The psychological benefits of a modern dinner party are real, says Jerome Burt, a clinical psychologist who has spoken widely about how they can save your life. Anticipation, laughter, physical affection like a hug, and resting turn on a variety of systems in the body that contribute to well-being. A dinner party “can activate the ‘will to live’ and ‘I love living’ circuitries like nothing else,” he says.
Still, it can be difficult for hosts to evoke that feeling of belonging, especially if their social circle is transitory, they’re a nervous chef, or are bringing together people who are strangers to one another. That’s where creating some kind of simple formality—a mellower version of strict mid-century protocols—can turn a simple gathering into a dinner party.
Setting an intention for the meal creates comfort for guests and hosts alike, says Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters. “‘Purpose’ is just a different way of saying, ‘What is the need around which I want to bring people together?’” she says. Maybe it’s to welcome a new friend to the neighborhood, celebrate an accomplishment, try a new recipe, or mark a community ritual together. (For a few years, I had a huge party every summer, the only goal of which was to eat a giant Low Country boil, with our hands, in the heat.)
Defining a purpose for a dinner party may feel a little high-strung, too much like sending out a meeting agenda. But Parker thinks of it differently. A purpose “allows people some amount of shared context, a shared story, a shared way of knowing what to talk about,” she says. It allows people to connect in a meaningful way, and the added context helps guests settle into the evening and enjoy the company of others. It’s what my friend Carey accomplished so well with Soup.
That’s not to say the food doesn’t matter. The ultimate comfort of a dinner party is that everyone knows the intention will be backdropped by a central activity: eating dinner. Without that cohesive element, everything goes adrift, as famously demonstrated in the “Dinner Party” episode of The Office, which becomes a horror story as the guests wait, and wait, and wait for the promised osso bucco.
Different home cooks set their own ground rules based on what they personally find comforting. Jeff Chu, an author and journalist who also writes the food-rich newsletter “Notes of a Make-Believe Farmer,” draws on his family’s Chinese heritage when he brings friends around the table, which means serving every meal family-style. “That’s not just about Chinese culture and tradition, though that’s a part of it,” he says. “It also creates a sense of belonging, because it gives people agency. If you hate asparagus, you don’t have to take asparagus, it’s not pre-plated for you, you’re not forced to push it to the side or worry about how it’s going to look.”
Similarly, Charles Hunter III—a personal chef and recipe developer who writes The Salted Table blog—leans on his memories of Southern family cooking when he hosts dinners. “I conjure inspiration from the Sunday suppers we had, which were ritualistic in our family,” he says, who all met up regularly at his great-grandmother’s duplex. Hunter now creates occasional pop-up dinner parties in addition to his own entertaining, and the goal is to make people feel like they’re at those Sunday suppers, even if they’ve never been. That means abundance and familiarity. “I want to evoke that feeling, that vibe, of there being plenty of food for people to choose from,” he says. “The comfort of eating things that feel familiar, even if they’re different.”
Writing my book during the pandemic allowed me to conjure some of those fuzzy dinner party feelings. I could imagine sitting late into the night at Maya Angelou’s table, picking the crumbs off plates of Edna Lewis’s peach crumble, drinking Hannah Arendt’s martinis, listening to Ella Baker’s stories, and stroking Agnes Varda’s finicky tabby cat.
Yet there’s no substitute for the real thing. And as we tentatively begin to venture out again, seeking comfort and belonging, there may be no better salve than a dinner party—a real one, this time. Something simple, filled with purpose and context, and structured around low-key formalities that create freedom and relief for the attendees. For Chu, that process has been profound. “My goal,” he says, “is just that whoever’s around the table will love being with each other.”