What Do You Need To Throw An Excellent Dinner Party?
Throwing a dinner party always sounds like a great idea. It seems like it will be a lot of fun to have friends and family in your home, set up the dining area to look sophisticated and classy, and offer them some delicious homecooked food, wine, and good conversation.
This is the idea. However, the reality can be somewhat different. It’s easy to become stressed, flustered, and disorganised when you’re trying to keep everyone happy and make your dinner party perfect.
The first thing to remember is that it doesn’t have to be perfect. Your loved ones just want to enjoy themselves, and they want you to enjoy yourself as well. They would rather things weren’t quite right than for you to be stressed out and anxious the entire evening. It’s important to bear this in mind because although striving for perfection is not bad. It can sometimes be detrimental to the overall enjoyment of what you’re trying to do.
Something else to think about is getting organised. The more you can think of in advance, the smoother the dinner party will go, and the more at ease you will be, whether things are perfect or not. Read on to find out more about what you need to throw an excellent dinner party that you’ll enjoy as much as everyone else.
A Corkscrew
This first idea might not immediately come to mind, which makes it such an important one to consider. In most cases, your guests will come to your dinner party with a bottle of wine – it’s good etiquette.
Although the tradition was always that the host would buy wine for the guests, and the host should keep anything a guest brought for themselves, in most cases, the wine that guests bring is opened. This is why you need to have a corkscrew. If a guest brings a bottle with a cork rather than a screw top, you want to be able to open it.
Matching Wine Glasses
On the subject of wine, it’s also a good idea to have a good set of matching wine glasses. Diamante wine glasses are a great choice as they look elegant and sophisticated, and they will look lovely on the table. Why not make things even more classy with matching diamante champagne flutes as well? In this way, you can have a toast at the beginning of the evening, or greet your guests with some champagne or sparkling wine, before moving on to a wine that matches the food you’re serving when you’re sitting at the table.
It might sound like a lot of trouble to go to when it comes to finding the right wine for your meal or even each course if you want to take things a step further, and it’s not something that everyone is going to want to do. However, if you are interested in food and wine and want to research this idea, it can be an added element to your dinner party and impress your guests.
Tablecloth
Having a tablecloth on your dining table – or kitchen table – can instantly transform the dining area into something beautiful. A tablecloth is a great way to showcase your individual style, as you can pick any colour, shape, or pattern you want. You can have a few different tablecloths in your home and choose the right one for the right occasion – perhaps a Christmas-themed one for festive get-togethers or a brightly coloured one for summer parties.
On a practical level, a tablecloth with protecting your table from spills and other issues, and they are easy to clean. At the end of the evening, all you have to do is pick up the tablecloth and put it in the washing machine, and the table itself should be clean. The final reason for having a tablecloth is that it will cover your table. This might seem obvious, but if your table is old, stained, drawn on, or otherwise not something that fits with your elegant dinner party aesthetic, you can quickly cover it and make it blend in to fit with what you want your home to look like.
Napkins
In order to make your guests feel comfortable, it’s also a good idea to include napkins on the table. This will enable people to keep themselves and their food clean, and if there are any small spills, they can use the napkins to tidy up – this saves them a job and stops them from being embarrassed.
If you want a cohesive look, you can find napkins that match your tablecloth. However, if you want something easy to deal with, you might prefer paper napkins to cloth ones. If you feel this is the best option for you, make sure you pick recycled ones or eco-friendly versions and dispose of them in the right way.
