Tuesday, November 10, 2009

guesting

Entertaining. My friends have always been about entertaining - generous and lavish and in particular, have always been fabulous guests. But this past fortnight, in my new place, the friends (fabulous friends who I love dearly) I have had around for dinner have left me feeling poor of pocket and, worse, a highly disgruntled host.

What has happened to halcyon days where said friends would turn up with a little yoo hoo! at the front door - carrying exactly what you'd asked them to bring (and even a little novelty bottle or box of sweets for afterwards).

I put together the post below in the vein of my current favourite book of entertaining (as left on our kitchen table by my flatmate Anne), Entertaining Under the Influence. But the post doesn't stand alone as a mere didaction of unspoken advice. It is couched in the frustration of a fortnight's strained entertainment and longings for Things Past.

It is an in depth description of the one rule I would remind my guests of, if I had the courage, or better still if they read this blog:

Guesting

Rule Number 1:
You should bring something to the table that offsets the labour and cost your host has expended on you by adding a degree of unanticipated enjoyment to the evening. A bottle of wine is favourite classic. Though a fabulous salad or dessert (check with your host first!) or a lively but unusual pet that you can bring out for the party's amusement and then put comfortably and humanely away in a cage during dinner, never misses the mark either.

Rule Number 1.1:
When asked explicitly to bring a bottle of wine. You should not turn up empty handed. Or worse, with the dregs of an old bottle of party liqueur. Nobody wants to drink liqueurs before, or even with, dinner. Midori rarely goes with anything meal short of a sponge trifle and erroneously assumes your host even enjoys Mexican cordials.


Rule Number 1.2:
If you've been asked to bring the wine, then you're responsible for bringing the wine. Never assume your host has some in reserve.

From the host's perspective, with this in mind, it's necessary to tailor your meal and indeed the structure of the entire evening to your guests' little ways.

For example, if you have a guest who likes to stop in at McDonald's before they come for dinner - plan a light meal and a wide range of starter canapés beforehand so you can feast up and still have salvageable leftovers for the next day.

If, on the other hand, your guest likes to fill up on the starters and then cry off the main - don't offer any. Make the meal big and simple and straightforward. Make the wine a-plenty (assuming they bring a bottle) and make sure the music is up.

Above all - generousity is at the heart of entertaining, but it's a heart with two very separate very necessary ventricles through which the generousity must pass* and if you friends just aren't giving to the unspoken code of guesting, the entertainment will, starved, expire.

I have no answers to this - I have the same two friends coming over again on two separate occasions in the next fortnight.

Perhaps if I withhold their dinner...?

* :P yes, I'm all about the awkwardly constructed biological metaphors right now

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