I love going to restaurants and bars. Yet there’s something uniquely freeing and deeply personal about gathering people in a home with a meal as the main event. The food, the drinks, the required reason to stop delaying any plans to tidy up before guests arrive—a dinner party is a showcase of both the host’s taste and a small look into each friend’s taste through what they choose to contribute.
Eater was quick out of the gate to call 2024 “the year of the dinner party,” and a search analysis of various dinner party terms saw double-digit increases on TikTok going into the year. But it’s safe to say the dinner party never went out of fashion, even if it went by different names or saw small ups and downs over the years (RIP the late, great Dinner Party Download podcast). Simply put, there’s rarely a bad time to plan a dinner party.
A surefire way to lighten the post-dinner cleaning load while still serving hit after hit from pre-dinner cocktails to dessert is to have coffee concentrate on hand. Hear me out.
Coffee concentrate doesn’t have the best reputation. It’s easy to find, though the flavor more often lands on the “miss” side of hit-or-miss. There’s no denying the versatility though. Plus, there’s no brewing or waiting for the coffee to chill, and the coffee strength is consistent in big batches.
