Book Report: The Upper Crust, Dining with Socialites
We know. Your kitchens, closets, and under your beds, and even your oven are stuffed full of life’s necessities. You have no room for that gorgeous serving dish or that antique punch bowl that Nana offered you when she moved to a smaller house. When would you even use it, anyway?
In his pretty pink little book, Dinner Diaries: Reviving the Art of the Hostess Book, Daniel Cappello makes a strong case for old-school style dinner parties and urges us to reconsider the art of hosting at home. Inspired by hostess books of the 1890s and early 20th century, this coffee table book celebrates gracious hostesses and the dinner party as an art form. Placing emphasis on the memories he has of his own family’s dinner parties, as well as his own, Cappello challenges our fixation with reservations and restaurants, and invites us to imagine the experiences we could share around our own tables. This chic, clothbound book aims to stir up sentiments of joy and pleasure and to encourage us, in Amy Vanderbilt’s words, “to entertain and enjoy it.”
The book contains a Proust questionnaire of entertaining questions, filled out by prominent society women of our century like Nanette Lepore, Ivanka Trump, and Pauline Pitt. Some of these women take a casual approach, others are over the top party princesses, and all provide a voyeuristic look into how these hostesses prepare, perfect, and personalize their gatherings.
We loved reading that Carolina Herrera’s daughter Patricia knows that no dinner party is complete without a drunk, or that Allison Aston must always have a signature cocktail – a southside in the summer and a mulled wine, served hot, in the winter.
The book, which contains blank questionnaires in the back, is the perfect gift for any hostess. We also kept it for ourselves, because it looks great on our coffee table with its shimmery pink cover, and it reminds us to take pleasure in the details. That to slow down, set a table, and enjoy our friends’ company is something we definitely have time for. Oh, and to borrow our mother’s china for our next soiree.
