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A trip to Italy will quickly convince you that a formal dining room is perhaps not as important as one might think. Even if there is a dining room in an Italian home, it’s not where visitors naturally gather. They are more likely to head straight to the kitchen as soon as they walk through the front door. In Italy, everything happens in the kitchen. Even here, formal dining rooms are not used as often as a kitchen is.

Dining rooms versus kitchens

Nigella Lawson expresses her opinion on dining rooms: ‘People go slightly mad when they house-hunt, and tend to think a prospective home is better if it has a dining room. But there’s no point spending money on a room that hardly ever gets used — except, in my experience, as a dumping ground for stuff you can’t find a home for elsewhere — when the reality is the room you eat in every day is the kitchen.’

Even the idea of hosting a ‘dinner party’ is enough to bring on an instant headache. What should be a cosy gathering of kindred spirits becomes what Nigella refers to as ‘the full ambassadorial feast.’ If you’re trying too hard to impress your friends then what starts happening, rather sadly, is that you end up seeing them less often.

Nigella’s advice on entertaining

Nigella admits to taking simplifying steps when it comes to inviting people over for dinner. Her light-hearted approach stops her and her guests from ‘getting into a twitch’. She says she puts the plates and cutlery straight onto the table (without laying anything out).

By ‘plonking’ everything down in such a way, everything becomes less formal and more amiable. She also refrains from serving a starter. Not only does this little omission make life less complicated but it also gives you more time to enjoy the company of your guests over coffee.

‘Maybe I’m just making excuses for my own laziness,’ says Nigella. Whatever the case, she gives permission to stop with the ‘old-style, entertaining formula: course after course of exhaustingly cooked food.’

Tags: party, Party ideas