Dinner for Eight
“What you restore, restores you.”
Near the middle of the summer of 2021, I sat down to dinner with most of my team at work. There were exactly eight of us. The flow of the conversation and evening went perfectly. I started thinking to myself is 8 the magic number for a dinner party? Especially important as we restore our social lives to a semblance of what was. But if we resort to the same old two step are we doing ourselves a disservice? Yes, this is an epistemological look at the structure of a dinner party. If experience is the stuff of life and dinner parties are an experience, than this is important stuff to ruminate on.
As someone newly embracing his introvert disposition, this is a perplexing phenomena. The event itself is a social gathering whose written and unwritten rules have evolved with time. Combined with the rustiness of being out of practice for two years, then the planning becomes even more fraught. Taking lessons from the pandemic, we must consider the new rules for how to conduct such a party so that the experience is safe and enjoyable for all, which can be a murky endeavor. Outside or inside, individual orders or shared offerings, safe topics and others to avoid, so on and so on.
These are surface concerns though compared to the root question, who and how many to invite? Double digits, say 10 people, can be unwieldy and stretch your dining table limits. Four people is just a double date and not a dinner party. Six is more balanced but just a bit small for a party. Whereas eight now starts to look like a healthy gathering but not one where you will be cleaning dishes into the early morning.
Let’s consider the mechanics of dining at home. The average dining table length ranges from 60 inches to 72 inches (5 to 6 feet). This length will allow you to put three chairs on either side giving each person under two feet of space. Add on two chairs on either end and now you have 8 people comfortably. This arrangement is important for fostering conversation. Cross table conversations can happen more easily, and questions posed for the group can be answered by all without feeling like a census survey. The retention of all of these exchanges made easier by the intimacy of a small group.
So now, if we allow that eight is ideal, what do we think of this constraint. This self imposed limit runs counter to my philosophy on parties when I was younger; the more the merrier was the old philosophy. To be fair, I had a lot of fun and can look back on some memorable parties. But again, if the last two years has taught us anything it is the need for deeper and more meaningful connections and to stop avoiding touchy topics. That level of engagement cannot be fostered easily in large gatherings. Intentionality in party size is required.
A part of that intentionality is who will make up this party of eight? When we invited a broad group of people it was natural to just see what cross connections formed. At this point in life, everyone has very busy lives. Just getting everyone on the same date on the same night can be a logistical challenge. So we’ve started to lean into affinity group associations to form groups eight. College classmates, coworkers, family, old teammates, etc. The idea is that we can pick up from where we left off without the need for the expansive exposition of just getting reacquainted with each other. There is still space for new discoveries by going deeper into old existing connections.
All that said, at this point in April of 2022, much of the world is returning to a state prior to the Pandemic, but we will remain cautiously optimistic that the tide does not turn again. The ominous Omicron variant may have turned out to be the flash point where the combined vaccinated and infected populations crossed the threshold into a patchwork herd exposure. Now it’s time to herd–in groups of eight–together to begin to restore our dinner parties of yestereve so long ago.
