First of all, nobody took their shoes off. It’s a tacit rule: everyone keeps their shoes on. You’re not going to ask a lady who spent time carefully choosing which heels would match her vintage dress and elongate her legs to just.. take them off, are you??
The invitation said 9pm, people started arriving around 9:30pm and everyone respected the dress code.
No one, and I mean no one arrived empty-handed. I got red wine, white wine, argentinian gin and some sweet treats. A close friend of mine gifted me a jar of portuguese doce de leite, and it might be one be the best thing I’ve ever tasted.
I set up a beautiful table with a white tablecloth, a lace overlay, tons of old candles, inherited crystal glasses and mismatched silver plates. A table assembled over time will always look better than one bought in a single afternoon. People complimented the table before they complimented my outfit, and I pretended none of it had required any effort.
On the same note, I insisted I’d cooked nothing overly complicated even though I’d been in the kitchen since noon and had gone to three different shops or fresh produce and ingredients.
Someone casually brought an excellent bottle of wine without making a thing of it. He didn’t even mention it when everyone raved about it later. I had to thank him publicly so he’d get some credit. Very, very classy.
I barely touched the first course. I was still checking the oven, opening another bottle, finding a missing serving spoon while pretending to be completely relaxed.
Lots of small lamps were switch on alongside the candles, but never the big harsh overhead light. Never. At one point I stepped outside and the warm light spilling through the open windows, the clinking crystal and everyone talking and laughing made the apartment look like a scene from a movie.
Whatever amount of butter you think you need, triple it. I put twice as much as I thought would be enough and people still asked for more.
Same for bread, alas. We had charcuterie, butter, several dips. By the time the cheese course was served, everyone needed more bread.
Quickly, the corner by the window became where all the interesting conversations happened. In french we call it a contre-soirée: a smaller more intimate party inside the main one.
There were always at least four different conversations happening at the same time, plus another one in the kitchen. Nobody waits for a subject to be fully exhausted before introducing a new one. In the span of fifteen minutes, the table moved from rent prices to someone’s impending divorce, that local restaurant that has become impossible to book because of tiktok and whether the Bordier butter is salted enough. This is what real intimacy feels like.
When the ashtrays filled up, people starting tapping their ash into an empty gravy boat and onto a crystal coaster. I didn’t mind, it looked very chic (very french).
At around 11pm, something in the atmosphere changed. We went from drinking wine to sipping cocktails: gin and tonics, negronis and eventually the stronger stuff. Every laugh got a little bit louder and people moved a little closer.
The most carefully prepared dish wasn’t the one everyone talked about. I spent 3 hours on the main courses yet everyone became emotionally attached to the charcuterie spread, the Pata Negra and the Brillat-Savarin, my favorite cheese.
Everyone knew which parts of the apartment were off-limits. No one even asked to enter the bedroom or dressing room but everyone moved freely between the living room and the kitchen. At one point, there were more people in the kitchen than in the living room, smoking and laughing about something I didn’t quite catch. Apparently the real party always happens wherever something is still cooking.
Someone spilled a glass of red wine on the white tablecloth. It was ok, nobody panicked: we covered it with salt and moved on.
Gariguette strawberries with whipped cream make the best dessert. Everyone raved about how nice it was to end the meal with something fresh and light.
Someone took a few pictures of the table at the beginning of the night but after that, I didn’t see another iPhone all evening. Not even one lying face down on the table. This is my definition of respect, and of actually being present.
By the end of the night, nobody was sitting where they had started. Someone wanted to finish a conversation, someone had moved closer to the ashtray (aka the gravy boat), someone didn’t want to share too much about her new partner… The seating plan reorganised itself according to forces far greater than my little place cards.
Dessert doesn’t mean the evening is ending. We still had more drinks, digestives, and coffee. And the coffee almost restarted the entire night.
By 2am the table looked like a still life. The wine glasses were empty, a few orange slices remained in cocktail glasses, the wax had melted all the way down the candlesticks and onto the tablecloth. One could even argue the apartment looked better after dinner than before it.
At some point, someone started clearing plates despite being asked not to. Another friend started rinsing the crystal glasses while wearing clothes that should have never been anywhere near dishwater.
Everyone left at different times. The first to go was a girl who announced she had a really early start the next morning, yet she still left two hours later because she was telling a story that required significant background information. By 4am, the last two couples left.
Someone I didn’t know quite as well left saying she’d definitely invite me to her next dinner party later this month. I think that’s the highest compliment a dinner party can receive: it means the whole night really worked.
By the end of the night, nobody remembered the menu in the correct order: we remembered who made a great joke, who spilled the most tea over dessert and when we started arguing loudly in that very french way.
The next day, I got a text from every single guest thanking me for having them over and saying how much they’d enjoyed the evening.
I was exhausted from clearing the table and cleaning everything at 4am, and I remembered exactly why I limit myself to hosting one dinner party a month. But the next morning, still full of new memories and great laughs, I caught myself wondering.. should I start doing this twice a month??
·
Jul 2
First things first: nobody knew exactly how many people were coming. The host had a rough idea. I think that rough idea was wrong by about fifteen people.
This is why I hate Parisians
·
Jul 9
They wear something that shouldn’t work: the wrong shoes, the odd proportions, a color with absolutely no business being next to the others yet it works every single time. Try it yourself and you’ll just look confused.
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