‘You’re not on Come Dine With Me’: Expert advice on how to host a great night in

Don O'Neill cooks, and his husband Pascal Guillermie does the tablescaping for their dinner parties in Co Kerry.

The best nights don’t always happen when you’re out. At-home dinner parties are back in fashion, but gone are the days of ceremonial white table linen and stuffy seating plans.

Midweek meals have supplanted Saturday night soirées. Kitchen tables or picnic-style set-ups are preferable to formal diningrooms, and tablescaping is rustic rather than fancy.

The cost of eating out is cited by some as a reason for this shift. For others outside Dublin, restaurant closures during Covid left them with fewer options. But they all agree that there’s a cosy feeling of community that comes with feeding people in your own home that’s a catalyst for real connection.

The 2025 World Happiness Report, which surveyed 150,000 people across 142 countries and territories, appears to support this, finding that countries where meal sharing is common had significantly higher levels of wellbeing.

So what does a modern-day dinner party look – and taste – like? Here, four enthusiastic hosts-come-cooks reveal how they prepare their own perfect at-home, stress-free feast.

Al Higgins

Al Higgins hosts regular dinner parties with his wife Amy in their house in Stoneybatter in Dublin. Photograph: Al Higgins

“Food has become a really cool thing, so it’s nice to be able to say, yes, I can cook,” says photographer Al Higgins. He loves to cook and his wife Amy, who is a DJ, loves to bake, so they have people over at least once a month. They always host at Thanksgiving, as Amy is from the US.

The couple lives in a “tiny” house in Stoneybatter. “So we lay out plates on a small table and everybody takes as and when they want to. It’s always very communal and informal,” he says. For those who don’t have a lot of space, he advises just leaning into it and making the evening really cosy.

Higgins’s go-to dinner party menu begins with fresh burrata, whatever citrus is in season, olive oil and sea salt served with crackers – a recipe “stolen from a wine bar in Paris called La Buvette”.

“Then I usually serve mussels in cider; it’s really easy to make, takes 10 minutes and it tastes delicious.” For the main course, he likes to serve a big sharing steak, which he cooks on a smoker out the back of the house.

My jo