Heard the one about the couple that paid £40,000 for a new kitchen in 2005 and have only just started using it? It is not a joke. The days are dwindling when tables for six in well-reviewed restaurants were full every night. Dining at home is back. Sales of dinner party food are outperforming 2008 figures by more than 100 per cent; supermarkets are seeing wine sales rocket by as much as 200 per cent. But the re-born dinner party is a rather different affair to the classic image of a dining room table laid with polished silver. Eat out in someone else’s home, post credit crunch, and you are more likely to be served supper in the kitchen, dining on a casserole with good red wine bought at a third of restaurant prices.
I would not go so far as to suggest that eating in is the new eating out. After all, you can walk out of a bad restaurant, but not a dud dinner party. Restaurants offering good value are still busy, and Michelin-starred establishments forced into tempting deals. Arbutus in Soho does an early evening, three-course meal for £17.50 and Bentley’s in Piccadilly will serve you a glass of Muscadet and half a dozen oysters for under £10. But hosts who once booked the bigger tables are wary. "You can’t really tell your guests to stick to the set menu, or hold back from the lobster," says a friend who would formerly have taken friends and colleagues out, rather than invite them home.
February 9, 2009
