Come to a Dinner Party in My Tiny Apartment

I live in an almost perfect apartment.

The rent is cheap; the floors are hardwood. The balcony looks out to a quiet alleyway where kids play street hockey and people walk their dogs. The unit has a classic Montreal triplex layout: I don’t have a dining room, and the kitchen is long and narrow, housing a small table that seats two people (or three, if we really squeeze in).

When I moved in as a twenty-four-year-old starting a life in her first solo apartment, this seemed like enough. I imagined that, on the rare occasions when I had friends over for dinner, we could crowd into the kitchen or sit on the couch in the living room.

Not that I ever imagined having more than one or two people visit. My first year in Montreal was lonely—the world was still partially shut down from the pandemic, my work and school were entirely remote, and I didn’t have tangible ways of meeting new people. I focused on making my home a space where I loved spending time, hanging art on all of the walls and rummaging through thrift stores for trinkets.

I directed the same energy toward food. Away from the communal kitchens of apartments shared with roommates, I had the time and space to test out new recipes (mushroom risotto) and establish the staples I’d return to often (chickpea stew). Rather than something I did purely to sustain myself, cooking became a source of joy and self-care. Soon, I wanted to share that care with others.

There are few better ways to get to know someone than to share a meal together. Even the act of planning a meal is imbued with intimacy and thought; as I learned about my friends’ tastes and dietary restrictions, I started mentally imagining what I could make for them, designing little menus in my head. An eggplant rigatoni for my vegetarian friend; an arrabbiata for another who adores spicy food.

Having a friend or two over for dinner became a big part of how I socialized with those I grew closest to. Rather than going out to bars where we’d spend too much money and barely be able to hear each other, we gathered in my kitchen as soup simmered on the stove and opened a bottle of wine. And soon, as my social circle grew, so did my desire to host them all together—to fit everyone around one table. But how many of my favourite people could I really squeeze into my tiny kitchen?

• In Defence of Garlic in a Jar: How Food Snobs Almost Ruined My Love of Cooking
• I Was Lonely and Let an App Pick My New Friends. Here’s How It Went
• Canada Grows a Hell of a Lot of Lentils. Why Won’t We Eat Them?

Depending on what your TikTok and Instagram algorithms are feeding you, there’s a good chance you’ve come across dinner party content. In the past few years, the apps have been flooded with videos of people showing off their at-home soirees. They share ideas for party themes like “cheeseburgers and champagne” or “Spanish summer.” They walk you through the hours of prep they’ve done, including the grocery store run, dicing up fruits the day before, and pre-freezing decorative ice cubes filled with lemon rinds. The camera pans over elaborate table settings, often complete with personalized menus, lush bouquets, and lit candles—all in the same carefully selected colour scheme. And then, the final shot cuts to the table filled with people, all smiling and toasting as they prepare to dig in.

These videos often rack up hundreds of thousands of likes. Rather than just dinner, it really is an event, one crafted around not only food and community but also postable aesthetics.

The draw of this kind of content is immediately recognizable, especially for members of Gen Z, who dominate social media platforms (particularly TikTok, where estimates say they make up over 60 percent of users). Gen Z has been dubbed the loneliest generation, largely due to the amount of hanging out we now do online rather than in person. It’s no surprise that for the generation’s older members—like me, born in the late ’90s—the closeness of a dinner party seems even more appealing.

But everything I saw online gave me limited ideas of what hosting a dinner party meant. As I scrolled through videos of endlessly curated and highly aesthetic table settings, I felt like I wouldn’t be able to host a real dinner party until I moved into a bigger place, one with space for a big dining room table covered in candles and flowers and handwritten menus. There was an incongruity between the kinds of meals I wanted to cook for my friends and the format in which I was able to serve them. It didn’t matter how elaborate the recipe I found on Bon Appétit was or how long I’d spent in the kitchen before my guests arrived. The moment we sat down to eat on the couch, unable to fit more than three people at the kitchen table, the affair suddenly felt childish and embarrassing.

In those moments, I found myself wondering what I was really worried about. Hosting can feel aspirational even beyond the social media aesthetics. For a generation that came of age during the pandemic, with all the financial and career upheaval that entailed, inviting others into your home can feel like a way to show off what we’ve managed to build.

Hosting is a marker of adulthood, cementing you as someone with the ability to open your home to others. In some cases, it also serves as a marker of class. In displaying the prep work done in large kitchens and the plating on fine china, dinner party hosts are displaying a degree of wealth or financial mobility.

Of course, the class element of dinner parties has existed for about as long as dinner parties themselves. The modern dinner party took shape after World War II. These were more laid-back affairs than the stiff soirees of previous eras, but there was still an unspoken weight to them: they were opportunities for hosts to showcase their homes, their culinary skills, and—chiefly—how well connected they were. The dinner party was a way to signal upward mobility, the names on the guest list just as important as the quality of the food. But in the decades that followed, while class was still surely a part of dinner party culture, hosting evolved into more casual affairs. Rather than inviting people over to impress them, emphasis was placed on inviting those you genuinely wanted to spend time with. Hosting was no longer just about networking—it was about genuine connection and the joy of socializing in an intimate setting. Hosts began focusing not on how the party looks but how it feels.

In late 2025, Martha Stewart’s first book, 1982’s Entertaining, was republished after years out of print. The book gets to the heart of what makes hosting people so special: Stewart writes that “any form of entertaining involves expanding a private world to include others.” While touching on the personal, intimate side of having people over, the book also quietly alludes to the class element at play. Because while she says that, at its core, entertaining is simple—it’s just “one friend treating another”—it’s clear that some of her suggested party ideas are aimed at women who have access to a certain level of wealth and, chiefly, space. In a section titled “Summer Omelette Brunch Outdoors for Sixty,” she tells readers that “a generous patio, an expanse of lawn, or a formal garden invites a summer brunch.”

Other recent books explicitly—and more carefully—touch on the idea of class and money as it pertains to hosting. Published in the fall of 2025, Chelsea Fagan’s Having People Over opens with a frank discussion about socioeconomics. Fagan argues that people can host regardless of budget or tax bracket, though the specifics might look different. “I hosted potlucks and movie nights when I was at my most broke—sometimes relying on them to stock me with leftovers for the week to come,” she writes, “—and now I throw lavish gatherings for friends and family, because nothing is more worthy of disposable income than sharing it with others.”

I still have the desire for more space. I save the Pinterest posts about dinner party themes and ideas. And while the desire for space to host isn’t enough to make me leave my apartment, it is something I’ll think about and prioritize when I eventually move. But for now, dinner parties have still become central to my social life and one of my favourite ways to spend time with people, even if not in the way I’m used to seeing online. I had forgotten that inviting people into my home wasn’t about how the experience looked but how it felt. How do I want my friends to feel when they walk through my door—welcome, cozy, relieved? Is it a place where they can come over in their sweats and tell me about their horrible day over a big bowl of spaghetti? And how do I let my guard down to make that happen?

On Thanksgiving, eight of my friends piled into my apartment bearing wine and dessert. We cooked to accommodate a newly vegan friend, trying recipes we hadn’t before: seitan turkey and mushroom gravy, apple pie with vegetable shortening crust. We sat in the living room—half of us on the couch with our plates in our laps, the other half on the floor, our food on the coffee table. It’s a set-up my social circle has grown accustomed to. On holidays, on my birthday, on days when we just have a lot to catch up on, we find a way to squeeze in, and we drink and talk and eat until we can’t anymore. The food is loosely themed but in a way that prioritizes fun over all else: nominee-inspired dishes on the night of the Oscars, Thai food on the week of the White Lotus season three finale, stews and soups when it’s too cold to think of anything else.