But when Mike offered to organize and host what amounted to a 36-hour dinner party, I was immediately intrigued: could an around-the-clock cook fire still exert the same social force?
The centerpiece of the junket was a six-hour dinner party, prepared by the Australian chefs Neil Perry, Peter Gilmore, and Ben Shewry (of Attica, at No. 32, the only Australian restaurant in the top fifty).
Therefore, someone who attends a three-hour dinner party and drinks a martini before dinner, two glasses of wine with dinner, and an Irish coffee with dessert is impaired at evening's end, perhaps rather seriously depending on how large the martini and how strong the Irish coffee.
It's unrealistic to expect home cooks to chill or reheat or discard dishes every two hours during a dinner party, or every hour at a summer barbecue.
In the hour before a dinner party starts, I've got better things to do than beat cream puff paste.
When the Austin chefs Emmett Fox, Louis Lambert and Larry McGuire try to accomplish the feat this weekend on a private ranch as part of Vaca y Vino — a five-hour, 300-person dinner party with live music — they will turn to the methodologies of Francis Mallmann, the Argentine chef trained in France.
Later that night Mr. Stein arrived half an hour late to a dinner party of editors and agents in their 30s.
I know this because it was almost all she could talk for an hour straight at a dinner party several years ago.
And just hours before the Monday dinner party, Secretary of State John Kerry, in a press conference with Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal, had dodged a reporter's question about women driving, saying that "it's up to Saudi Arabia to make its own decisions about its own social structure".
I entered this trade, after fifteen years in a white-collar, smooth-talking line of work, as a refugee from romantic disgrace, and abstain from passing judgment, even on clients arrogant enough to schedule a dinner party six hours after I give their hall parquet the finish coat.
"Arlington Park," the sixth novel by the British writer Rachel Cusk, opens on a rainy night in a well-heeled suburb outside London and then follows an ensemble of disgruntled 30-something mothers through the mundane motions of a 24-hour day, culminating in a dinner party.
