Dining with your favourite people is one of life’s true pleasures. Tucking into delicious food, enjoying rich conversation and sipping on great wines is a fantastic way to spend your free time and so it’s no surprise you’re looking to recreate this enjoyable endeavour by hosting your own dinner party.
While simply serving up great food is, of course, the staple element of any good dinner party, there’s no denying that incorporating some other fun elements to make it stand out in the memory books is often necessary for maximum enjoyment. But how do you achieve this?
From coming up with a theme for the evening, which will dictate the food, drink and décor, to hiring entertainers to make your night one for the history books among your friends, we take a look at how you can create a memorable dinner party in your home.
Decide on a theme
The first big decision you’ll face when planning your big event is what theme you’ll be going for on the night. You don’t have to have a theme for your event, of course, but it will actually help you make other decisions a lot easier.
Are you hosting for a special occasion; an important birthday, or perhaps an event in yours or a guests’ life? If so, this should help inform your decision on what theme ideas you can shortlist. Consider if it’s more of a casual or formal affair you’re after and decide soon so you have plenty of time to prepare.
You could base your theme on particular country, making cuisine choices easy; opt for a particular film, book or play to base your night around; or even choose a colour and let this inform the rest of your choices, the options are aplenty here.
Think about your menu
Once your theme has been decided, you can now start to put together your menu, and this is the most important aspect of all, after all, your guests are here to dine and you need to go above and beyond to make this event special.
It doesn’t matter if you have the skills to rival a top chef or not as, if your abilities lie elsewhere, you can look to hire in a caterer for your dinner party to ensure the food is as impressive as all of the other elements you’ve prepared. If, however, you’d like to prepare the food yourself and show off your skills in the kitchen, then your guests will likely be just as impressed.
If this is a more formal affair then you could come up with a tasting menu for the event, including canapes, a fish course, pre desserts and paired wines from a sommelier, while buffet style dishes will be more suited to a more casual event.
Be sure to cater to guests’ food allergies and preferences and prepare as much as you can in advance, so that you can enjoy as much time with your chosen company as possible when the event comes around.
Prepare your table
What time of year will your dinner party be taking place? Is the weather reliable and good enough for you to host al fresco? Do you have sufficient space to host all intended guests comfortably? These are all questions that will need to be answered well in advance to ensure everything runs as smoothly as possible on the day.
Make sure that your table set up is as stylish as it is welcoming and comfortable for all guests and that it is dressed to suit the theme perfectly. Placemats, silverware, glassware and the like will need to be complemented with extra decorations such as flowers, flags (if the theme represents a particular country’s cuisine), candles and little goody bags to make your guests appreciate just how much effort you’ve put into the proceedings.
Extras to make the dinner party stand out
A superb and memorable dinner party will impress with more than just the food, so make sure you plan some extra entertainment to make the event really stand out as one of the best your guests have experienced.
Perhaps the whole evening could centre around a murder mystery or you could hire an entertainer to dazzle your guests – from musicians to magicians, this will really cement you as the host to beat. Prepare gift bags and make sure that there are plenty of snacks and drinks to be enjoyed before and after the dinner.
Whether this is a special occasion or not, your event deserves to be remembered for a long time, considering the amount of effort you will have put into it, and a fun and impressive way to achieve this is by installing a photo booth.
Whether you’re looking for a digital photo booth hire in London, L.A or Lisbon, you can be sure that guests will be wowed with this extra step you’ve taken, and better still, the photos can be sent straight to their phones, ready for sharing on social media. There are many other types of photo booths available, including 360 photobooths and vintage photobooths. So, you should consider which would suit your theme best and how you could incorporate such an addition your event.
Are you ready to host? If so, how will you make your event stand out from the rest?
