“Great for entertaining!” boast so many real estate ads. “Perfect party house!” They lie. I know because similar hype gushed from the sales literature for the home we bought while it was under construction: “Great flow – you’ll own the party place.”
Lulled into the vision, I foresaw our potential home dripping with party guests. I imagined couples canoodling on the terrace, old friends catching up by the living room fire, people who just met comparing pedigrees in the library. Hah!
Memo to home designers and real estate agents: The perfect party house is one big kitchen.
At every home party I’ve had – and most I’ve been to – guests migrate to the kitchen and stick as if winning lotto tickets were coming out of the oven. If the kitchen is the heart of the home, guests are the heart attack. “Flow!” I want to scream. “FLOW!” But guests don’t flow. They clot. Right there between the stove, the refrigerator and the kitchen sink. Right where you or the hired help need to be to keep the party going.
The kitchen-clotting phenomenon happened again this past New Year’s Eve at our annual neighborhood party. Even though our perfect party house has plenty of downstairs space outside the kitchen, every year guests still swim to the kitchen like salmon heading upstream to their breeding grounds. Only I get what motivates the salmon.
“Is it always like this?” I asked Linda, the server we hired who works lots of parties.
“Always,” she said. It’s after 1 a.m., and she and I are gathering the last of the champagne glasses tucked behind houseplants alongside feather tiaras and confetti streamers. “I wish they’d go to another room,” she added, “because I have to work around them all.”
I lob a call to Sherrie Foxman, founder and CEO of Party411.com, allegedly the largest party-planning site on the Internet. (Do they measure these things in inches?) I ask her my burning question: “What’s with the kitchen?”
“What do you have in there?” she asked.
“Well, this year it was desserts.”
“That’s your problem,” she said. “People hang in the kitchen when there’s something in there they want.”
“But,” I defended. “I put food all over the house, not just the kitchen.” The tradition at this party is we provide the champagne and beverages, and neighbors bring appetizers or desserts. Last year I put desserts in the dining room and appetizers in the kitchen. Everyone wound up in the kitchen. This year I put appetizers in the dining room and desserts in the kitchen. Everyone still swarmed the kitchen. That champagne was in the entry, soda and wine in the bar off the dining room, and a coffee station in the living room didn’t matter. Foxman could have predicted that.
“A kitchen with food is a stronger draw than any other room with food,” she said. “Plus, people like to see what’s coming out of the oven, and they think if they’re in the kitchen, they’ll get served first.” She mentioned she had just been to a party, where the hostess asked her to help get everyone out of the kitchen. “There wasn’t much I could do. She’d set the bar up in there.”
A deeper reason people migrate to the kitchen is because they associate the kitchen with comfort, she added. “It’s how we grew up. We gather around the kitchen table, and find comfort there.”
I guess that means in the future we’ll gather around the car, where more meals are being served today. “C’mon everybody! Party in the garage!”
Another approach might be to go with the flow. Put all the food and drinks in the kitchen, and let guests feel at home. But when the host can’t open the oven door without torching a guest’s hair extensions, or you can’t hear the oven timer over the singing of Auld Lang Syne, it’s time to herd the crowd out.
Marni Jameson is a nationally syndicated columnist who lives in the Denver area. You may reach her at marnij@comcast.net.
If you want to keep guests out of the kitchen at your next party, consider Sherrie Foxman of Party411.com’s tips:
- Don’t put any food trays or drink stations in there.
- Create a barricade. One host literally set up the bar at the door to the kitchen, so it was physically impossible for guests to pass. A row of Rottweilers also can do this job.
- If guests can’t all fit in one room, put the same food and beverages in two rooms – as long as one isn’t the kitchen.
- In houses where guests have to pass through the kitchen to get from one room to the next, put up a “No Parking” sign. Or one that reads “Food snatchers will get dish duty.”
