The Dinner Party Isn’t Dead: Our Family Traditions

There’s been a run of pieces lately about the death of the dinner party. One of them cited fifty years of survey data: in 1975, four in ten Americans had people over at least once a month. Now it’s one in ten. I read these with interest, the way you’d read about a drought somewhere else. This month, most of the country will set their best table. At our house it’s been set every day since I was a little girl. People ask: Do you eat like this every day? Here’s the answer.

Yes.

Now, the qualifications.

On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, my mother comes to lunch at my house. One o’clock. We sit at my kitchen table. It was my grandmother’s — a round marble top on pale oak, with two pale beige leather chairs. Placemats, good linen, flutes, china plates, cut flowers, and Arne Jacobsen’s stainless, which my parents bought when we lived in Los Angeles in the sixties. The design was considered so futuristic that when I was eleven, watching 2001: A Space Odyssey, there were the astronauts on their way to Jupiter, eating with our flatware.

Two courses, a main and dessert. It could be sushi, chicken pot pie, Japanese egg salad sandwiches; in winter, chicken and dumpling soup. Always sparkling. First thing we do is clink glasses and say cheers.

At my mother’s house, where we eat depends on the season and the headcount. The round table in the glass-enclosed nook if it’s chilly and we’re under six. May through September, the veranda, which seats six, or the terrace in the garden, which seats eight. And then there’s the upper terrace, with wrought iron tables and chairs for thirty.

We love a good table, and the longer the better. We call them feasts of the long table. In 1987, we seated five hundred down the middle of Palm Olive Drive for the Sonoma County Barrel Auction. I wrote about it in A Cultivated Life. Most recently it was a hundred, one table between two vineyard blocks, for guests who didn’t know where they were having dinner until that morning. And many people still remember the harvest lunches, at picnic tables in the gazebo — fifty guests a day, five days a week, for five weeks, my mother hosting every one of them.

For special meals and larger groups, the dining room table. With all the leaves in, it seats eighteen. It came home with us from our Paris apartment when I was growing up. It’s French Empire, and the armchairs are Empire too: stamped Georges Jacob, with ormolu swans’ heads at the armrests, lions’ claws at the feet. On nights in Paris when my parents went out and I had a date, my brother Laurence would be served dinner at that table. Just him. We ate at it in France. We eat at it here.

My mother has hosted Thanksgiving every year since we moved to Iron Horse — fifty of them, at the dining room table with all the leaves in. She starts setting it a week ahead. It evolves. I’m under strict instructions not to photograph the work in progress, but I promise I’ll show you the finished table after Thanksgiving. 

In the meantime, as a tease, here’s a shot from 11 years ago.