We Have Always Done This
Before there were restaurants, before there were Deliveroo riders weaving through traffic, before someone invented the concept of a "food influencer" — there was a table. And around that table, people sat together and ate.
The dinner party, in one form or another, has existed for as long as civilisation itself. It predates democracy, the printing press, and indoor plumbing. Every culture on earth has some version of it. And while the food, the customs, and the seating arrangements have changed dramatically over the millennia, the fundamental purpose has remained remarkably constant: to bring people together, to mark occasions, to build alliances, to share pleasure, and to feel less alone in the world.
When you sit down at a dinner with friends — whether it is a carefully curated supper club or a last-minute "come over, I have made too much pasta" situation — you are participating in a tradition that stretches back thousands of years. That is not a small thing. Understanding where the dinner party came from helps us appreciate why it matters so much now, at a time when shared meals have the power to genuinely change your social life.
The Roman Convivium: Where It All Began (Sort Of)
The Romans did not invent eating together — that honour belongs to whichever early human first passed a chunk of roasted mammoth to a neighbour. But the Romans did something remarkable: they turned social dining into an art form, a political tool, and a cultural institution all at once.
The Roman word for a banquet was convivium, which translates roughly as "living together." That etymology tells you everything about how the Romans viewed the shared meal. It was not merely about consuming food. It was about the act of existing alongside other people, sharing time and space and conversation as much as bread and wine.
A typical Roman dining room — the triclinium, named for its three broad couches — held nine diners arranged in a U-shape around a central table. Guests reclined rather than sat, leaning on their left elbows and eating with their right hands. The positioning was deliberate: who sat where communicated volumes about status, favour, and political allegiance. The host controlled the seating chart with the precision of a military strategist.
The food itself ranged from the modest to the absurd. During the early Republic, banquets were relatively restrained, reflecting conservative Roman values. But by the Imperial era, things had escalated considerably. A wealthy host might serve pheasant, raw oysters, lobster, wild boar and peacock. Rome's sumptuary laws had tried, with mixed success, to hold this back: the lex Fannia of 161 BC restricted a host to a single un-fattened hen, and later laws went after force-fed dormice, shellfish and imported birds. The more extravagant the spread, the more powerful the message: I can afford this, and you cannot.
The Roman convivium was as much about politics as pleasure. Hosts used dinner parties to display wealth, reward allies, monitor rivals, and conduct negotiations. The phrase "keep your friends close and your enemies closer" could have been coined at a Roman banquet.
But beneath all the political manoeuvring, something genuinely human was happening. People were gathering. They were talking. They were laughing — often quite loudly, given the quantity of wine involved. Entertainment was woven throughout the evening: music, poetry recitations, theatrical performances, and philosophical debates. The best Roman dinner parties were multisensory events designed to stimulate the mind as much as the palate.
Medieval Banquets: Spectacle, Status, and Subtleties
Fast-forward a few centuries, and the dinner party had transformed into the medieval banquet — an event that makes a modern wedding reception look positively restrained.
Medieval banquets were held in great halls, decorated with tapestries and illuminated by candlelight. Seating was rigidly hierarchical. The most important guests sat at a raised top table, while everyone else arranged themselves below in order of decreasing social importance. The further you were from the host, the less important you were — and everyone knew it.
The food was abundant and theatrical. Multiple courses were served, each one more elaborate than the last. But the centrepiece of any medieval feast was the subtlety — a dish designed not to be eaten but to be admired. Castle-shaped confections, mythical creatures sculpted from sugar and marzipan, fountains that actually worked — these edible artworks were paraded into the hall with fanfare and music, drawing gasps from the assembled guests.
The purpose of a medieval banquet went far beyond feeding people. These events were where business was conducted, marriages were arranged, alliances were forged, and awards were bestowed. Dining etiquette was taken extremely seriously, and getting it wrong could damage your social standing for years. Knowing which dishes to eat with your hands, how to share a trencher with your neighbour, and when to pass the salt were all markers of breeding and education.
In Britain specifically, the medieval feast was deeply embedded in the social calendar. Christmas, Easter, harvest festivals, and saint's days all came with their own traditions of communal eating. The village feast — often hosted by the local lord in the great hall — was one of the few occasions when people from different social strata shared the same space and the same food. It was imperfect, hierarchical, and often uncomfortable, but it was communal in a way that few other aspects of medieval life managed to be.
The Georgian Era: More Is More
If the Romans turned dining into politics and the medievals turned it into theatre, the Georgians turned it into competitive sport.
Georgian dinner parties, particularly among the wealthy, were exercises in staggering excess. A significant banquet could run to twenty or more dishes per course, all set on the table at once in the French style — the Norfolk diarist Parson Woodforde recorded a dinner in 1783 of two courses of around twenty dishes each, followed by a dessert of twenty more. The table would be laden with roasted meats, elaborate pies, jellies, syllabubs, and ornamental centrepieces that nobody actually intended to eat.
The Georgian approach to dining was heavily influenced by French cuisine and Continental manners, reflecting Britain's complex relationship with its cross-Channel neighbours. The dining room became a dedicated space in the home — no longer a multi-purpose hall but a room designed specifically for the ritual of eating together. Fine china, silverware, and crystal glasses became markers of taste and wealth. The dinner party was an opportunity to display your possessions as much as your hospitality.
But the Georgian dinner party also introduced something that would define social dining in Britain for centuries to come: conversation as entertainment. Without the elaborate performances of the Roman convivium or the theatrical subtleties of the medieval feast, the Georgian table relied on the quality of its guests' company. Wit, charm, and the ability to hold the table's attention became social currencies as valuable as wealth or title.
Victorian Dinner Parties: Rules, Rules, Rules
The Victorians, as they did with most things, took the dinner party and codified it within an inch of its life.
A Victorian dinner party was governed by an extraordinary number of rules. Dishes were now brought out in sequence rather than piled onto the table all at once, and the order of courses was fixed: soup, fish, entrée, joint, game, sweet, savoury, dessert. Guests were seated according to strict social precedence. Ladies and gentlemen alternated around the table. The host sat at one end, the hostess at the other. Conversation topics were regulated — politics and religion were to be avoided, and anything remotely indelicate was strictly forbidden.
The number of courses could be staggering. A grand Victorian dinner might involve ten or more, each requiring its own set of cutlery, its own wine pairing, and its own rules of engagement. Navigating the place setting alone required the kind of spatial awareness usually reserved for air traffic controllers. Getting the etiquette wrong was social death — a fact that kept Victorian hostesses in a permanent state of low-level anxiety.
The Victorian dinner party is largely responsible for our modern table manners. The fork on the left, the knife on the right, the dessert spoon above the plate — these arrangements were codified in Victorian etiquette manuals and have barely changed since.
Yet for all its rigidity, the Victorian dinner party served a vital social function. It was where families sized each other up for potential marriages. It was where business relationships were cultivated. It was where reputations were made or destroyed over the course of an evening. And beneath all the starch and formality, it was — at its best — an evening of genuine pleasure. Good food, good wine, good company. The fundamentals have not changed.
The Twentieth Century: Democratisation and Fondue
The two World Wars fundamentally changed British social dining. Rationing made lavish entertaining impossible, and the social hierarchies that had defined the dinner party for centuries began to crumble. By the 1950s and 1960s, the dinner party was being reinvented as a middle-class institution — smaller, more intimate, and more accessible than its aristocratic predecessors.
Then came the 1970s, and with them, the most gloriously eccentric era in British dinner party history.
No 1970s home was complete without a fondue set, even if it spent most of its life gathering dust in a cupboard. The dinner party menu of the era reads like a time capsule: prawn cocktail served in a wine glass (the only acceptable starter), a main course involving something ambitious from a Robert Carrier cookbook, and Black Forest gateau for pudding. The wine was invariably Blue Nun or Mateus Rosé.
The prawn cocktail deserves special mention. From the 1960s through the 1980s, this gloopy combination of defrosted prawns and sweet Marie Rose sauce, perched on a nest of iceberg lettuce, was the undisputed king of British starters. It had crossed the Atlantic from America, where the original cocktail sauce had been zingier and more assertive. In British hands, it became sweeter, blander, and somehow entirely irresistible.
What made the 1970s dinner party remarkable was not the food — much of which was, by modern standards, questionable — but the spirit. This was the era when ordinary people began hosting with confidence. You did not need a butler or a country house. You needed a dining table, a fondue set, and the nerve to invite your neighbours round. The dinner party became democratic, informal, and genuinely fun. It was about the people, not the performance.
The Wilderness Years and the Restaurant Boom
The 1980s and 1990s brought a shift. The rise of restaurant culture, the explosion of celebrity chefs, and the increasing pace of modern life all conspired to move social dining out of the home and into commercial spaces. Why spend hours cooking when you could book a table at the new Italian place on the high street?
Dining out became the default social activity. The dinner party did not disappear entirely — it was kept alive by enthusiastic home cooks and the occasional competitive dinner party circuit — but it lost its central place in British social life. Eating together increasingly meant eating in public, surrounded by strangers, in spaces designed by someone else.
Something was lost in the transition. The intimacy of a home-cooked meal. The vulnerability of cooking for friends. The unhurried quality of an evening where nobody needed to flag down a waiter or worry about the bill. The dinner table has always functioned as a kind of sanctuary — a place where people can be themselves in ways that restaurants, however excellent, rarely allow.
The Supper Club Revival: Full Circle
And then, in the 2010s and 2020s, something remarkable happened. The dinner party came back — but in a new form.
The modern supper club takes the ancient principle of the convivium and gives it a contemporary twist. Small, intimate gatherings, often in private homes or unusual venues, where strangers sit together around a shared table and eat food prepared by passionate cooks. The location might only be revealed on the day. The menu is fixed. The guest list is curated. And the entire point — the actual reason people show up — is to meet someone new.
In London, supper clubs have become a fixture of the dining scene, with social media turning underground events into sold-out sensations. But the trend extends far beyond the capital. Across Britain, people are rediscovering the simple pleasure of sitting down with people they do not know and finding common ground over a shared meal.
The post-pandemic world accelerated this revival. After months of isolation, people were hungry — not just for good food, but for genuine human connection. The appetite is generational as much as anything: the National Restaurant Association's 2023 State of the Restaurant Industry report found two-thirds of American Gen Z and Millennial diners would be likely to join a chef's table or tasting dinner, roughly twice the rate of baby boomers. Supper clubs, pop-up dinners, and cookbook clubs have become vehicles for the kind of connection that social media promised but never delivered.
The modern supper club movement proves something that the Romans understood two thousand years ago: breaking bread with strangers is one of the fastest routes to meaningful connection. You arrive not knowing anyone. You leave with stories, shared laughter, and — if the evening goes well — plans to do it again.
What Devon Brings to the Table
Here in Devon, we have our own rich tradition of social dining. The county's food culture — rooted in extraordinary local produce, from Dartmoor beef to Brixham seafood — provides the perfect foundation for communal eating. Devon cream teas, harvest suppers in village halls, and the long tradition of the pub lunch are all expressions of the same instinct that drove the Roman convivium: the desire to sit with other people and share something good.
The challenge, of course, is that many of the places where this used to happen naturally are disappearing. Village pubs are closing. Community halls are underused. The informal social infrastructure that once made gathering easy is under strain. But the appetite for connection has not gone anywhere. If anything, it has intensified.
That is precisely why initiatives like Dinners With Friends exist. We are not inventing something new. We are carrying on something ancient — the tradition of bringing people together around a table, in beautiful restaurants across Exeter and Devon, and creating the conditions for genuine human connection. The food is wonderful. The venues are carefully chosen. But the real magic is what happens between people when they sit down, share a meal, and discover that they have more in common than they ever expected.
An Unbroken Thread
From the triclinium to the supper club, from the Roman convivium to a Wednesday evening in Exeter, the thread is unbroken. Humans have always gathered around food. We have always used the shared meal as a way to build trust, forge bonds, celebrate, commiserate, and simply enjoy being alive in the company of others.
The forms change. The etiquette evolves. The prawn cocktail gives way to the tasting menu. But the impulse — the deep, ancient, profoundly human impulse to sit with other people and break bread — remains exactly what it has always been.
The next time you sit down at a dinner party, a supper club, or a table full of people you have only just met, remember that you are doing something your ancestors would recognise instantly. You are living together. You are sharing. You are part of a tradition that is older than recorded history and shows no sign of stopping.
And that, really, is the whole point.