Want to know how I systematize dinner parties to make them less stressful and easier to plan? You’re in the right place; keep reading to see how I break down a dinner party plan into distinct parts. By fleshing out each of these plan components for your dinner party, you can feel confident that you have things in order, know what you’re doing, and will be ready for your guests when they arrive.
Breaking Down the Dinner Party Planning Process
Dinner Party Menu Planning
Use a Template
In the interest of getting to a “rinse and repeat” mentality on dinner parties and dinner party planning, I like to break the food down into the following Dinner Party Menu Template:
- 1 – 2 Appetizers
- 1 Main
- 2 – 3 Sides
- Veggie
- Hearty (Likely a starch if you’re not limiting carbs like we are)
- Bread / Biscuit / Dipper (Again, if you’re not limiting carbs, this is usually fairly straight forward. Since we are a low carb household, this usually means making a quick biscuit, muffin, or some other form of keto bread recipe.)
- 1 Dessert
- Drinks
- If you’re feeling adventurous, then add on wine, beer, or spirit pairings for the meal. We’ll talk more about those in another post.
- Don’t forget water! Keep your guests hydrated.
- Coffee, Tea, etc.
- It is usual to offer some form of non-alcoholic and non-water beverage to your guests. Examples include but are not limited to iced tea, pop, sparkling water.
- We typically serve some form of caffeine, whether that is coffee, tea, pop, or something else. We typically have coffee or espressos after dinner, but we can also do that at 10:00 pm at night with no ill effects to our ability to go to sleep.
I use this template as a starting point with the very important addendum “There are no hard and fast rules.” What I STRONGLY recommend is to balance the effort required for each of the dishes you’re making so that you don’t wind up with five super fussy dishes that each require a ton of prep and last minute cooking. Pick a couple of dead simple dishes, a couple that can be almost or completely finished in advance, and no more than two fussy recipes. To start, I would actually say to just pick, at most, one fussy recipe or none at all.
Plan for Dietary Restrictions
Next: Find out if there are any special dietary restrictions. This is where lots of people get tripped up. Don’t worry. It’s not just you. Figuring out what to feed someone with different dietary restrictions can be a challenge. We’ll work through it. The starting point for my menus has been keto / low carb. As the dinner party guests rotate, I adjust my menus to accommodate whatever other restrictions come up. Some examples I’ve run into include various combinations of: gluten-free; coconut, peanut, tree nut, wheat, buckwheat, egg, and soy allergies; aversions to cilantro and thyme; vegetarian; vegan; no poultry; no beef; and no pork. The recipes and menus on this blog are intended to help you with this. Note: I am working through a backlog of dinner parties before the existence of this blog, so the inclusion of various recipes will be an ongoing process.
Advanced Prep Plan
Then there’s the Advanced Prep Plan. For my dinner party planning, I carve the work up into what can be done in advance versus “day of”. The “template” for prep work goes along the lines of:
More Than 2 Days in Advance
- House Prep Part 1 – Whatever cleaning you plan to do. Prioritize rooms where people will be spending the most time. If you need to just shut an office, bedroom, play room door, so be it. That’s fine. Unless you’re actually having an open house, which is a different kettle of fish, no one needs to see those spaces.
- Grocery Shopping – If you can get this done on its own evening / day, you can start the next with a clean slate and fresh energy for other prep work. It’s even better if you can just include this with whatever other normal shopping you may be doing for the week.
*** NOTE: If you’re only planning 2 days in advance or less, these tasks will need to be squeezed into the time you do have.
2 Days in Advance
- Grocery shopping – Only if you didn’t already go shopping. There are times when even the best laid plans just don’t get you to the store as soon as you’d like.
- Chopping / dicing / slicing prep work – For example, if I’m going to need chopped veggies as an ingredient, this is the time to get all of your chopping out of the way. I put all of my prepped ingredients in zip top bags, label them with a Sharpie, and stick them in the fridge until I’m ready to use them.
- Thaw any frozen meat – Let me tell you how annoying it is to forget this step. If you happen to have a sous vide, you can cheat pretty easily. If not, it’s going to be more annoying. Check out my recommendations regarding last minute thawing if you happened to forget.
Day Before
- Most Baking and / or Desserts – For me baking is a mess and a time suck that I’m better off not fooling with right before people are due to arrive. That’s not to say I’ve never done it. ;-P It just works MUCH better when I don’t. I’m a really messy baker.
- Assembly of any dishes that can be refrigerated – If your serving bowls happen to have lids, great. If not, just use regular storage containers and set the associated serving bowl somewhere convenient. That way you don’t have to dig it out or figure it out the next day.
- Casserole prep up to the point of baking – I have and use several Pyrex dishes with lids. That lets me stack things in the fridge to be pulled out and popped in the oven the next day.
- House Prep Part 2 – Whatever straightening up you plan to do. I don’t know about you, but in our house, sprawl can happen in a single day. However, you’ve already cleaned, so this is just a quick pick-up.
Dinner Party Plan “Day Of” Timeline
Last, but not least in your dinner party plan there is your “Day Of” Timeline. Depending on which analogies work with your brain, this is your “Detailed Agenda”, “Go Live Checklist”, “Final Battle Prep”, etc. The key to making this work is to make and stick to your Advanced Prep Plan. The day of your party, the goal is to only have the following tasks:
- Assembly of dishes that cannot or should not be prepped in advance for freshness purposes
- Final cooking / baking / roasting
- Last minute house prep (e.g., I wait until the last minute to put out guest towels in the bathroom.)
- Setting up your table and serving area
My plans and timelines are typically built with the intent of the final prep being done in a 2 hour window. For us, this is usually between 5:00 and 7:00 pm on a Friday.
Once you are into the “Day Of” Timeline, everything is about cook times, cook temperatures, cooking vessels, serving vessels, and the oven and small appliance management required to make it all flow. When I say oven and small appliance management, I mean making sure that you have enough places to cook, heat, or keep warm your menu items given the oven space, number of stove top burners, and / or small appliances (like Crockpots, Instant Pots, induction burners, sous vide devices, etc.) that you have available. I know that people may or may not have certain devices, so I try to provide alternatives whenever possible. In another post, I’ll share items that I find particularly useful to have at hand for dinner party prep and execution.
I freely note that, in many cases, I am not on my own for “day of” party prep. My other half likes to cook too, so we can divide and conquer a portion of the work. If that is going to be the case, we typically increase our difficulty level in some way. Usually this means adding another dish in the last 30 minutes or something along those lines. In general, the plans I post are made for one very focused person. If you will have help from a second person, the timing still applies but at a slightly more relaxed pace.
Recap and Next Steps
Okay, now keep that paradigm in your head:
- Menu Planning
- Advanced Prep Plan
- Day Of Timeline
Whether you are planning weeks in advance or two days in advance, attacking each of these items in order will get you through it. Eventually, you may find yourself planning the dinner party the day it is happening. I don’t really recommend doing that unless you happen to like the adrenaline rush. (Personally, I love a good adrenaline rush. 🙂 )
If you’re ready to see some of my past menus, head straight into the Dinner Parties.
- I include my Advanced Prep Plans and “Day Of” Timelines where possible.
If you’re just looking for some recipe ideas, go ahead and browse the Recipes by Course.
Fort more tips, tricks, suggestions, and explanations, check out more topics in Dinner Party 101.
