I’m going to say it because you’ve been thinking it: dinner parties aren’t what they used to be. They’re still enjoyable, sure, and a great way to reconnect with friends, yes, but they’re different now. More manicured. More pristine. If I’m being honest, too manicured. Too pristine.
When you’ve got companies like Hauste creating slickly curated dinner party guides, menus and lists of must-have items for you to buy, and TikTok influencers bragging about entering their “hosting era” in sponsored videos for Argos and Febreze, it’s easy to feel like the concept has become detached from its roots. Somewhere along the line, dinner parties have mutated from a chance to feed your mates into an opportunity to grab online clout.
“There’s an artistic upheaval because everyone wants to ’gram everything they do, and everyone’s decided everything in their online life has to look perfect,” says chef, food stylist and writer Rosie Mackean. “But there are ways to do it and not make your life a living hell whipping 20 fucking kilos of butter.”
Mackean’s newsletter The Dinner Party has over 14,000 subscribers and her latest cookbook, Good Time Cooking: Show-Stopping Menus For Easy Entertaining, is set on helping readers rustle up easy menus for every occasion. She believes the best hosts are those who are “relaxed and excited about what they’re doing”. If your friends walk in and see you getting worked up over the imperfect scoops of mashed potatoes you’ve plopped into vintage silver ice cream coupes you got on eBay for “an absolute steal” (£45), then that anxiety is going to bleed into the food and the room.
One easy way to relax yourself is by putting away your phone. “As soon as you start flashing photos and filming, you lose the intimacy of a dinner party completely,” says Mackean. “The best way to determine if you’ve had a good dinner party isn’t from the content you captured. “It’s from the hangover you’ve got the next day and the quality of the sausage sandwiches you’re eating because you’re practically dying.”
The dinner party has always been something of an It-girl or It-guy status symbol – just think of the flex Jesus was making to his apostles with the Last Supper – but it’s become less about the food and much more about the aesthetic in recent years. Every dinner party I see posted online seems to follow the same achingly sincere paint-by-numbers candlelit tablescape. It’s all become a bit stale – a bit vibeless. Plus, the food always looks as if it’s gone cold.
Dinner parties are supposed to be fun and messy and raucous. They’re where you tell your best friend you’ve always thought their younger brother was fuckable after seven glasses of vinegary sauvignon blanc. They’re not supposed to be turned into Instagram Reels or an eight-strong photo dump straining, and failing, to look blasé. How intimate can your ‘best friends dinner’ really be if you’re spending half the evening cosplaying as a chef and turning it into content?
To quote the Irish author Colm Tóibín: “Dinner parties are just people arguing about things they know nothing about.” That’s what I love about them. Let’s bring back arguing over hors d’oeuvres – a bit of chaos. Forget curated: give me gravy-stained tablecloths and mismatched cutlery. You should be able to arrive at your mate’s flat wearing whatever you feel comfortable in without the fear of having your outfit blasted to 2,400 followers. It’s not a proper dinner party unless someone’s forced to sit on a wobbly stool at the corner of the table while you’re eating an oily salad using the curséd three-prong fork you only break out in case of emergency.
No one knows more about what makes a dinner party hum than Maria Georgiou and Rhiannon Butler. Known collectively as Mam Sham, they are self-proclaimed ‘Princesses of Packaging and High Concept Dinners’, blending comedy performances with standout food and drink in their sell-out London supper clubs. In their own words, Mam Sham events are all about: “Good grub, lols and excellence.”
The best thing? How unserious their events are. “All Rhiannon and I ever want is for people to have a good time,” says Georgiou. “We know being an adult can be trash, so offering the ride of your life where your only worry is when the next toilet break is – that’s the crème de la crème of luxuries.”
Mam Sham want you to get stuck in, get drunk and bump elbows with the people around you. And that’s the energy we should all be embracing more at our dinner parties at home.
“If I see another table draped in white linen, dotted with colour-coordinated cherry tomatoes, deconstructed mangetout and boiled eggs next to smudges of butter, I’m going to scream,” agrees Georgiou. “These ‘food concepts’ are just another backdrop for the ‘curated life’... it feels like a hollow attempt at sophistication. What’s troubling is how this trend taps into the broader culture of exclusivity and thinness, with its barely-there plates and clean, sparse designs to be seen and not eaten. It mirrors fashion’s long-standing obsession with minimalism – a culture that doesn’t include actually nourishing yourself. It’s a fleeting aesthetic on a phone screen.”
We all know we’re online too much. It’s hard not to be when our jobs, entertainment and even our friends are. I’m not saying you need to go completely off-grid and shield yourself from 4G towers, but it’s important to untether from our devices sometimes.
Do switch off your phone and make a fuck-off ragù this weekend. Don’t use your next dinner party as an excuse to squeeze in more screen time.
Lucas Oakeley is a writer and journalist who has written for a range of publications including VOGUE, GQ, The Independent, National Geographic, The Guardian, The Economist, Esquire and Time Out. He loves long walks on the beach but hates getting sand in his shoes. His debut novel, Nearly Departed, will be published in summer 2025. You can find his Instagram, TikTok and Twitter all under @LucasOakeley
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