Come Dine with Me! The Key to Student Dinners

By Features Reporter Oisín Henebery 

I am very much pro dinner party. Cannot get enough of the things. For me, they represent an ideal collaboration of values and interests. Requiring organisation, a lack of seriousness, but with a casual formality, dinner parties can be the apogee of great evenings.

Equally, they can epitomize the very worst in entertainment. An excess of arrogance, a distaste for minor spillages and a narrow-mindedness can cause this great institution to crumble to its knees. Indeed, the ingredients to a good dinner party can sometimes be as finely balanced as those of the most complex and demanding dish. 

The problem for me is that dinner parties can occupy in the student psyche a rather unappreciated place. For some, they scream formality, and snobbishness, and in general, aloofness. For others, the word “notions” may come to mind. All in all, the relationship between student and dinner party, if not one of suspicion, may be said to be one of misunderstanding. 

However, much of these myths are to be dispelled. Dinner parties should merit a centre stage role in the student experience and they should be regular features of the term. They ought to thunder out full throttle onto the scene. You see, student dinner parties are full of potential energy, that just needs converting. 

We are all faced with the burden of increasing food prices. This very week, students from across the country are out in force protesting the cost of tuition fees, and the cost of living in general. While doing this too they are most likely building up quite the appetite and thirst to sate and quench. Minor comforts such as restaurant dining can come with major prices. However, the dinner party represents the perfect antidote to this sorrowful situation. Cooking at home is always cheaper, and dinner parties are the forum through which the restaurant atmosphere unites with affordable prices. The price of cooking for 6 people can equal the cost of a single set of courses at a restaurant. As such, dinner parties provide the ultimate opportunity for cost-effective formal dining.

Equally, dinner parties have the added bonus of cheap booze. While a couple of glasses of wine can have you reaching deep for your partner’s chequebook in a restaurant, and any attempt at getting wasted will lay waste to any thought of financial security, dinner parties are, if not a hangover cure, then a financial one. Now not all dinner parties demand a Nile of Negroni or a Seine of Smirnoff, but even the smallest of consumption benefits from savings at a dinner party.

But, as extensive as the financial benefit may be, there are a plethora of further draws to dinner parties. Now it should be stressed at this point that for savings to materialize, there is an important rule which must be emphasised. Dinner parties, and their burden, lie not on the shoulders of any one man or woman. They flourish when shared out, when the food, the drinks, and the duty of hosting is split. While there is certainly an element of trust demanded here, this is the source from which dinner party benefits blossom.

We are all familiar with the far from pleasurable ritual of cooking on a Monday and sustaining ourselves off the same food until Thursday. This meal plan saves money, but fills one with a dread not dissimilar to the feeling when a mate suggests a third day of drinking at 10am on a Wednesday morning. It sounded great on Monday, but now has acquired an inflection coloured by the past two days consumption. Dinner parties stand in objection to this problem. They defend the idea of a varied diet. Whether this variety is achieved with roommates collaborating alongside friends, dinner parties offer an opportunity to detach oneself from the ordeal of the same meal every day.

Besides, however, dinner parties are tremendous fun. You can invite whomsoever you choose, matching friend groups, and making new ones. Everyone loves the thought that they are a potential match maker too, and dinner parties are the playground of couple making. You can choose seats, ignite conversations, and altogether feel very important.  In truth, you can make all the rules. There is neither closing time nor dress-code, and no topic is off the table. Whether it be a small party of four, or one as large as twelve, dinner parties are flexible, adaptable and an escape from the all too familiar pesto pasta with which I have become all-too familiar.