I’ve always loved the holidays, but the older I get, the more I realize it’s about getting together and sharing a special meal together.
My family lives all over the East Coast. We have our own homes, routines, jobs, friends, and lives that keep moving in completely different directions throughout the year.
And then, somehow, we all come back to the same table.
There’s something really special about that to me.
The kitchen gets too crowded. Someone is opening wine before they’re technically supposed to. Everyone has an opinion about how something should be cooked. The same stories get told that we’ve all heard a hundred times, and somehow we still laugh.
Eventually, dinner makes it to the table.
And for a few hours, everyone is exactly where they’re supposed to be.
I think that’s part of why I fell so deeply in love with cooking and entertaining.
I think that’s also why, whenever I can, I love serving dinner family style.
There’s something about putting the food in the middle of the table that changes the way people eat together. Suddenly you’re passing the potatoes, reaching across someone for the bread, insisting they take the last piece, asking for just one more little spoonful of something you absolutely did not need.
It makes dinner feel shared in every sense of the word.
I love a beautifully plated dish, but there’s an intimacy to family-style dining that I don’t think you can recreate any other way. Nobody is having their own separate experience. You’re all eating from the same table, passing the same dishes, and participating in the meal together.
Maybe it comes from growing up around holiday tables like this one, but to me, that’s what entertaining has always been about.
Food gives us a reason to stop moving for a minute. To sit down. To pass something across the table. To stay for one more glass of wine.
The menu changes. The houses change. We change.
But we still come home for dinner.
