In the city, people often don’t have space or furniture to set a table for 8 or ten. If we get married later, or not at all, we might not even have plates and forks for that many. Ironing a tablecloth is something I have to gear up for. A recent WSJ.com article, “No McMansions for Millennials,” recommends houses of the future skip the dining room, but “don’t forget space in front of the television for the Wii, and space to eat meals while glued to the tube, because dinner parties and families gathered around the table are so last-Gen.” This is an architectural change that’s already happened in most apartments, where the sofa is much more important than the table.
And then there’s the food. My mother can’t remember anyone who was such a bad cook that they would say, in the car on the way over, “Let’s drink and not eat.” Cooking was what women did, some were better than others, but no one burnt the roast. But one of the gifts of feminism has been letting women off the hook as cooks. If a strain of organic parenting wants to hang them back up, so be it. Among my acquaintance, it is as likely to be the husband as the wife who cooks, but both work full time so either might feel put upon about the division of labor come Saturday. Standards are also higher. I think my mother is an excellent cook, and we think alike in our preference for Italian over French. But now we eat Thai for lunch, buy hummus in tubs, can get a tagine from the fancy salad bar. The New Brooklyn Cookbook is filled with recipes I don’t want to try to impress my (nonexistent) colleagues with at home: I can buy them down the block.
And yet, it isn’t so fun to go to restaurants anymore, not when you can’t get a table on Sunday at 3 p.m., no restaurant designer understands that at least one of the room’s six surfaces should be sound absorbent, and salads are in the double digits. I want more connectivity. More good food. More time with friends. I want to talk. Dinner parties used to do that, and I wonder if they can again. It’s my entertainment resolution for the new year: I want to make an effort, and I doubt I am the only one.
Architecture and design critic Alexandra Lange is co-author of the new book, Design Research: The Store That Brought Modern Living to American Homes.
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