Delicious evolution of a dinner party
Columnist gets the dessert shift at Beaconsfield event
Over 154 Fed columns, I have made dessert maybe a dozen times. I am not good at it. Usually I ask someone to bring a pie. So when Stacey Daub, organizer of the fifth annual Beaconsfield Travelling Dinner assigned me the dessert course, I felt like I’d rolled snake eyes. But I understand that mounting the event, a multi-course evening spread over dozens of homes, is a time-consuming task. With more than 100 participants, there is no wiggle room for people to selfassign courses.
I don’t live in the zone (a detail that becomes contentious during the evening) so I’ve teamed up with my pal Robyn Doolittle, whose condo is one block south of the Queen St. border (also a source of vexation). Following a printout of Daub’s tournament-style chart, we walk from appetizers at Katherine and Dave’s, to Enrico’s, where he and Gloria are serving soup and salad, main course at Amanda and Jonathan’s, then back to Robyn’s to host dessert, with a fresh group of guests at each location. This week, the shoe is on the other foot. I’ve never met these people and now I’m a guest in their homes. 5:30 p.m. First course: Appetizers Catherine greets guests at the door while Dave stays in the kitchen, cooking. She says not to bother removing our shoes, unconcerned with the original hardwood floors, darkened in the entranceway by a decade of family life.
Soon the dining room is filled with 10 people, mostly strangers to each other.
David enters with a tray of bruschetta, some with sun-dried tomatoes, others with chicken liver pate.
Katherine and Dave have done this before and are relaxed. They’re comfortable with strangers snooping around the house, letting us define them by the framed eye chart in the living room, their son’s cello leaning against a wall, the dining table of gnarled wood, or their indecision to fill its antique crevice with resin.
The evening offers all the voyeuristic appeal of Hoarders or Cribs, but with the comforting equalizer that everyone shares middle-class status, give or take. Over the night, I meet lawyers, marketers, researchers and business consultants with jobs I don’t understand. I don’t meet any bus drivers or CEOs. Nor would I expect to. Sure, the Queen West area is plenty diverse. But the dinner party, as a social event, is mostly a middleclass endeavour.
There is the prerequisite awkwardness as guests ask each other what they do for a living, making mental adjustments for conversational door No. 1 (follow-up work questions) or door No. 2 (current events). But it’s no more than the usual stage of ice, pre-breakage.
After three years of inviting strangers into my home for dinner, I’ve come to embrace that initial awkwardness. Conversation has to accelerate gradually, like a car. But unlike a car, alcohol helps. 7 p.m. Second Course: Soup and Salad The back door of Enrico’s house is open and the bouquet of seafood wafts to the street. Guests pour into his kitchen, as co-host Gloria fills goblets with her ceviche. Everyone has had a drink or two, possibly three. It seems normal now to wander into this stranger’s home, to toss our coats over a banister as if we were old mates. Everyone grabs a seat at the table, gets comfortable and swaps stories of the first course. Two childhood friends who’d left their husbands at home are having a swell time, giggling. Gloria dishes out her ceviche, a gangbusters combination of scallops and tomatoes over smooth avocado, with bits of crunchy sesame and wasabi for welcome texture. She’s made an alternate, with egg in place of scallop, for Robyn, the born-again (but easy-going) vegetarian. Enrico stands at the stove, stirring his Guyanese crab chowder. Gloria takes the seat next to me and is happy to talk exclusively about restaurants. By the time Enrico serves the soup, our time is nearly up. Having encountered, as a host, guests who are difficult or, through no fault of their own, just boring, I’ve sometimes wished I could fake an emergency text from my kids’ babysitter as an excuse to leave. But as a host, you can’t escape. Tonight, I’m halfway hoping that someone will be sufficiently awful, dull, rude or bigoted, that I’ll get to exercise my freedom to run away. But it doesn’t come to pass. 8:30 p.m. Third Course: Main “If you want a drink, come in the kitchen,” says Amanda. “Otherwise, feel free to snoop around the house.” We choose both. Wine in hand, we go up and down to the third floor, peeking into the bathroom, the home office, making estimated guesses at how much Amanda and Jonathan paid for the house (oh, come on, everyone does this) and how much they’d have to earn to make the mortgage. More money than we earn, concludes Robyn the condo-owner and me, the renter. They could have gotten away with only serving a roast, without any sides. But Amanda and Jonathan have gone all out, with ribs (barbecue-sauced tofu for vegetarians), tomato salad, root vegetable salad and scalloped potatoes. By now everyone is familiar, per- haps too much so. One guest bemoans the expansion of the neighbourhood event’s borders, as if those coming from beyond were going to steal Beaconsfield land and impose foreign values. I confess to being a carpetbagger. The gentleman does not care for this, or for the Toronto Star, and is not shy about sharing his opinion. But can anyone wearing a bow tie hope to be taken seriously? 10 p.m. Fourth Course: Dessert One of my core beliefs (outside of Haitian Voodoo) is that when guests arrive, a host must not be cooking, other than reheating. Attention should be reserved for making guests feel comfortable. I’ve made pecan shortbread cookies and hot chocolate steeped with ancho chili.
All the guests stream in at once. There aren’t 10 chairs, but it doesn’t matter. It’s late. Everyone is full and tipsy. Having finished comparing the area’s public schools, conversation turns to zombies. One pooped member of the party nods off on the sofa.
Remember, we’ve all been drinking since 5:30 p.m.
“Would anyone like another cookie?” Robyn says, twice, seeking to wrap it up. Ending a dinner party is always tricky if the host is overly polite. But Stacey and her husband, Peter, have built in a fail-safe device, a party at their house that gives everyone a place to gather and an excuse for hosts to toss out lingerers.
The Beaconsfield Travelling Dinner is shaped by this neighbourhood’s character. But it’s a great idea that would work anywhere. It would be different, for example, with students in residence walking from dorm to dorm or Bridal Path homeowners driving golf carts.
In the neighbourhood where I grew up, we would have strolled between lowrise apartment buildings, from Indian, to Italian, to Jamaican. Wherever you transplanted the event, some things would never change. First, it is a lot of work for the organizers. Second, it would carry tonight’s spirit of Halloween for grown-ups, as couples scamper up the block, looking for the next house.
It’s a unique experience that tugs at a part of childhood most of us don’t dwell on. Part of Halloween, and part of this night, is the surprise waiting for you at each house — a peak inside at who your neighbours are, how they live and whether or not you could be friends. mintz.corey@gmail.com