Mastering the Art of the Tense Dinner Party

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/01/t-magazine/food/dinner-party-tension.html

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At its most fundamental, a dinner party is an act of generosity: Come to my place; share my bounty. Of course, it’s rarely that simple. Historically, the powerful have used these gatherings to flaunt their resources; social and political intimidation in the guise of hospitality. In the potlatch — a ritual practiced during precolonial times by indigenous tribes of the Northwest Coast, including the Tlingit and the Kwakiutl — the high-ranking host plied guests with enormous amounts of food (like fish oil served via quart-size spoons), often until they threw up. Then he extravagantly gave away his most prized possessions — or destroyed them in a bonfire, just to show that he could. To save face, a guest from a rival village might counter with an even bigger feast.

In the hermetic kingdom of the dining room, the host is at once benefactor and dictator. Alfred Hitchcock planted whoopee cushions on seats, dyed food blue and reversed the order in which courses were served, beginning with dessert, all to toy with guests. Less whimsically, during the Renaissance, the aristocratic Borgias were rumored to poison them. Even without the threat of assassination, a dinner party can feel like a series of psychological tests: the table set with tiny implements of inscrutable purpose, the small talk like needles through the eyes. “The Oxford Dictionary of Psychology” by Andrew M. Colman includes a listing for deipnophobia, fear of dinner parties — defined as “irrational,” although I’d argue it’s a defensive response to our divided modern times.

For if, as some have argued, dinner parties heralded the dawn of civilization, in this brawling era they might soon hasten its end. Anxiety over forced commingling may explain why the trope of the nightmare feast has taken hold in the imaginations of contemporary artists. In the filmmaker Sally Potter’s recent farce “The Party,” guests are at each other’s throats before they down a single hors d’oeuvre. Shattering revelations bring a whiff of hell: “I smell burning,” a guest says. “The vol-au-vents,” the hostess sighs, momentarily distracted from her disemboweled marriage. Thomas Adès’s opera “The Exterminating Angel,” which had its American premiere this fall, revisits the surrealist Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film of the same title, in which socialites at a posh soiree can’t muster the will to leave. They stay, trapped by their own ennui, until food and drink run out, until the mask — of who they strive to be in the presence of others — slips, and they wind up slaughtering a sheep and roasting it over a burning cello. (In uncanny synergy, Buñuel’s vision has likewise infiltrated both a musical-in-progress by Stephen Sondheim and David Ives, and Darren Aronofsky’s vexed 2017 horror movie, “Mother!,” which ends in cannibalism and an ugly subversion of the Last Supper.)

Why, then, does it seem as if everybody is throwing dinner parties again? We could glibly dismiss it as an offshoot of the current obsession with food; amateur chefs looking to unleash their inner Yotam Ottolenghi on a captive audience. But these days, when our greatest intimacy is with our iPhones and the spectral kinship of social media has supplanted the immediacy of analog conversation, the true hunger is for earnest connection. And so a new strain of dinner party dispenses with formality in favor of sincerity. Gone are the napkins tortured into swans and the postprandial triage that shunted women to the drawing room while men dealt business. Instead, tables might be strewn with tea lights bought by the hundred at Ikea and dessert might be Klondikes from the corner bodega. In a communal, nigh utopian spirit, guests share in the labor and often bring dishes of their own, rehabilitating the idea of the potluck — which has nothing to do, etymologically, with potlatch: It derives from the 16th-century English pot-lucke, in which unexpected guests made do with whatever was already in the pot. For every dinner party that leaves family bonds and lifelong friendships in smoldering ruins, there is another that unites and reaffirms: Yes, we really like each other.

This might be easiest to achieve by inviting only like minds. Simone Beck, the co-author, with Julia Child and Louisette Bertholle, of “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” once insisted that in France, a guest list should be composed of people “on the same social rung, and who share the same way of life and religion.” (She added, acidly, “The melting pot works in the United States but not in this country.”) Framed that way, the desire to retreat from the world and seek solace among familiars can appear suspect. How will we ever understand one another? So while some choose to replenish their beliefs in the company of those certain to uphold them, others are opting for a different kind of gathering, one that rebuffs both Buñuel’s tableau of enervated privilege and social isolation and Mao Zedong’s 1927 declaration that “a revolution is not a dinner party.” Such events are expressly devoted to the kind of conversations once considered off-limits in polite society (and deftly maneuvered out of by a vigilant hostess). One initiative, Salvage Supperclub, hosts meals in actual dumpsters to address the issue of food waste; another, the People’s Supper, invites guests with divergent political views to share dinner in private homes across the country. The Nigerian-born chef Tunde Wey travels from city to city pairing dodo (fried plantains) and ayamase (green-pepper stew) with pointed discussions on blackness in America, the rise of anti-immigration sentiment and the unequal distribution of wealth. As these diners break bread, they, too, make a connection; if they can’t agree, there is at least some hard-won acknowledgment of common ground: I am here, and I hear you. No, a dinner party is not a revolution. But in the right hands, it might start one.