The New Year is nigh and with it, party time is inevitably upon us, so I thought I’d write a little paragraph about what to look out for when organising your own shindig. I was going to be serious about it, divide it into chapters and publish it in instalments. Very Dickensian, appropriate to the time of year, but too much bother, so here’s the whole thing in one rather long blog. To avert disaster, one must first know what disasters one might face. We shall start with the most disastrous of all disasters, but first I would like to state the obvious:

A party should be a time of fun for everyone.

I used to do parties, where I would be cooking for days (literally) and when the last dish was eaten I would invariably be so exhausted that I would excuse myself to go and take a shower from which I never again returned. Well, not on the same night anyway. I have grown up since and dispensed with all the culinary mayhem. Now I want to enjoy my own parties, so the food is simple and whoever does not like it, can go and stuff their own mushrooms. So first advice: Relax. Stop worrying whether the guests will like the food, the candles, the punch, the cocktails, your partner… and face the awful truth: You’re feeding them, you’re plying them with drink and you’re not charging them at the end, so they’d better eat and drink what they’re given and be grateful.

But back to the question:

What is the worst thing that can happen at a party?

Short of the building burning to the ground, but not very short of it, is the (hopefully remote) possibility of the host running out of drinks. Now that is a completely unforgivable sin and you should cast whatever friend has subjected you to such abject suffering to oblivion. There are few excuses for running out of booze and none of them are acceptable before four in the morning. I remember a well stocked party which was drunk virtually dry by three in the morning. Completely unfazed, the resourceful host mixed up a batch of cocktails based on Southern Comfort, Angostura bitters, lemon and soda, the only four items left in the bar, and the party continued. So rule number one: STOCK UP!

Let me say it again: Stock up, Up and UPPER!!!

Even if you’re guests are light drinkers, you asked them to dinner and expect them to stay no later than ten thirty and you know they will each bring a bottle, I would still recommend that you have at least one bottle of wine per person ready to be uncorked! You may think this excessive, but remember that unless you open them, the bottles are not likely to go off in a hurry. Just add them to your stash for the next party. You will be glad to find some left over bottles in your cupboard the next time you’re expected to bring a bottle and forgot to buy one.

I remember a ghastly party (I have a feeling this sentence is going to come up again) at which the hosts had firmly banked on us (me & partner) bringing a bottle of wine, but we had seen an interesting hard cover book, which we thought would make a much more interesting present. When the hosts saw the shape of the wrapped thing, their faces dropped, sweat started pouring from their brow and they divided the single resident beer carefully among five thimbles to be enjoyed ‘en aperitif’. Hemlock, I believe would have been a better idea: Drunk by the foolish couple at the precise moment they realised their shortcomings as hosts, it would have left the remaining three of us to share the only bottle of wine, thereby saving the evening at least halfway.

Contemplating this cautionary tale, you will realise that as a host, you must never ever leave yourself at the mercy of your guest’s offerings. I mean, even IF everyone brings a bottle, they might ALL be bottles of Carlo Rossi and then where would that leave you?? So one bottle per person!

This, I hasten to say, is the absolute minimum and really only appropriate provisioning for as sedate little dinner. A true, all-out night of prandial excess requires more than a few bottles of Riesling. Something that looks like a full bar is more what you (and most certainly your guests) are after, so don’t chicken out and go for broke. You do not need to buy every bottle on the shelf, but have whiskey, gin, vodka, rum and tequila if you want to impress. It does not need to be the best money can buy, in fact, I would advocate the monetary middle ground here. Something that does not send your guests into the bushes for a Technicolor yawn the moment it passes their lips would be good, but two dozen bottles of Patron tequila will make everyone think you’re a poncy wanker. What you’re aiming for is not top quality, but top quantity!

If you’re strapped for cash, or if you’re just pathologically stingy, have two different types of hard liquor (I love that word!) on hand and boldly ask: “Gin ‘n Tonic or Whiskey Soda?” and if anyone dares to say: “You wouldn’t have a Rum and Bitters?”, simply reply: “Not if you didn’t bring one!”. I might, in fact advocate a smaller bar, because in my experience, the more choices you give your guests, the more they dither and delay and you really DO want to get them drunk as soon as possible.

As for the wine, stick to something simple, not too dry, not too fruity and most importantly – Properly Chilled:

The Importance of ICE:

I am not referring to the deliveries made by a shady member of the underworld, but to the humble cube of frozen water. I am sick to the teeth (and sometimes through them) of wine served ‘at room temperature’. Sipping red at a temperature where you can see the alcohol evaporating before your eyes is not my idea of a pleasant, so for God’s (and his favourite creature’s) sake, get ice and get mountains of it and please, please remember that the more wine you chill, the longer it will take and the more ice you will need.

And here’s how you do it: Don’t bother to buy eskies, you will need many more than you will want to spend money on, so get these large Styrofoam boxes fish suppliers use (preferably before they’ve used them, though), stand all your bottles up in them and pour large bags of ice over the bottles about three hours before your party begins. Do NOT add water, close the lid and step away and at the time you will need it, all you bottles will be swimming in a large ice bucket, floating in perfectly chilled bliss.

Keep more ice at hand in case you need it. And you will. How much ice will you need? One little bag per person is probably about right. If the day’s very hot and you’re entertaining in the pm, you’ll probably need more and one thing that is for certain… you can never have too much ice if you want your guests to chill (bad one), which leads us not so neatly to the next point:

Down With The Pre-Poured Drink!

Resist the temptation to pre-pour glasses of beer, wine or anything at all and have it schlepped around on trays. Caterers love to do that, because it makes their life easy, but unless your guests really do arrive all at the same time and the trays are refreshed often, with the warmed up drinks being poured away (oh, the depravity!), your guests are just going to end up with lukewarm booze.

And so, on to my last piece of advice for the day:

The Glamour of the Cocktail Party:

Your guests milling around sexy cocktail glass in hand, sparkling with wit, the ladies glamorously attired, jewellery flashing, the men suave and nonchalant and you, a debonair half smile playing under your dashing moustache, everyone admiring the insouciance you display with a cocktail shaker… That’s the dream. The reality however is that you’ll have created a list of eight cocktails, all of which only you know how to make and your twenty guests all order something different, so you’ll have to make each order separately, everyone will be waiting impatiently for their drink, you’ll be sweating like a ballerina at an outdoor lunchtime performance in Trinidad and when you think you’ve served everyone, they’ll be wanting seconds, which will be the exact moment you’ll notice that the ice is starting to run low and the evening’s just begun and death will seem more attractive than another hour with a cocktail shaker stuck to your hand with Triple Sec.

My advice? Don’t do it! Unless you can afford a couple of decent mixologists (who the hell came up with that nonsense of a word), don’t even go there. Alright, if you absolutely have to, try your hand at a single pre-dinner cocktail first and see how you like it. If that doesn’t put you off the idea, at least limit yourself to two simple cocktails that do not require muddling, producing foam or balancing the shaker on your nose like a trained seal. A Martini, a Manhattan, or maybe a Daiquiri with the lime squeezed in advance could be an option. And please train the help to produce a halfway decent version, because what was fun at seven thirty will start to be slightly wearing at ten and feel like hell on earth at midnight, so do yourself a favour and have a backup.

The next thing you want to remember is that cocktails are a hell of a lot more potent than wine and your guests are likely to be very drunk very fast and very sick very likely, so make sure there’s enough shrubbery around. I have seen scenes I would rather not have and distantly remember disgracing myself all over the Russian Chargé d’Affaires. I was young and foolish and also never invited again…

The Christmas eve cooking madness is over, so now it’s prep for New Year’s we will be working on. We had a more than full house yesterday and that means 75 people all eating 6 course dinner, bringing the total plates sent out to 450. Starting at about 8pm and ending at a rather late 11:30, that means sending out just over 2 plates every minute and with a total of 28 components for the whole dinner, someone had to put something on a plate every one and a quarter second.

And that’s not all. Take the main course, for example: The beef needs six minutes on the grill, but the Yorkshire pudding needs twenty-five to bake, so while doing his other duties, the guy at the oven needs to keep an eye on several different batches of Yorkshire pudding and he needs to fire each batch of steaks exactly six minutes before his pudding is done. At the same time, the goose breast needs to be roasted, rested, sliced and the foie poached, the pie top baked, fresh batter whisked up, the lobster battered and deep fried, the bacon rendered, the mushrooms fried while the fish is floured the sorbet scooped, the oysters shucked the jelly scratched, the foam shaken up, the caviar spooned and the pudding plated.

Unless you have worked in a busy kitchen before, you don’t realise the speed and coordination needed to make it all happen.  I’m quite proud of my team, because they go through this kind of thing like a train at full steam, producing high quality food with complete insouciance. They chat and crack jokes, but they never slacken off and keep checking on each other to make sure it all arrives on the plate at the same time, again and again and again. Apart from a major mistake (such as dropping a pan full of just fried fish – and NO, it does not get dusted off and plated!!), no one ever stops moving. From the front of the pass (that’s where the finished plates are waiting to be picked up) it all looks like an intricate, well choreographed modern ballet, and I know all will be well. Unless…

Here’s the thing that will throw a major spanner into the works: A request for something that is not on the menu. Now, we know that some people just can’t eat some things, so we are prepared. We actually have a replacement for every one of the six courses, even though we don’t advertise it as an option (we don’t want to make our lives more miserable than is absolutely necessary). The problem starts when someone asks: Can I just have some steamed vegetables? Answer: NO.

Now, unless you realise what is going on in the kitchen, you might think we’re just being haughty, but steamed veg (or stir fried, or whichever way) means one person washing, peeling, cutting, steaming, plating for about ten minutes. Not long, but long enough to stop 20 dishes from going out on time, delaying everything that follows and making the kitchen grind to a temporary halt. And a halt, believe me, is something you don’t want at all, because chances are, the guys will never be able to get back to the same momentum. It’s like taking a break on a long run and then trying to muster the energy start up again and finish – not easy!

I don’t think much of chefs or kitchens that try and show their ‘power’ by refusing a reasonable request (really quite pathetic) and believe me, if we can, we will, but sometimes (and just sometimes) it just simply isn’t possible.

A Merry Old Christmas to you all and may all your dishes come true.

First off, I have to say that I like Christmas. I’ve liked it for the past fifteen years, ever since I left Luxembourg and was spared the ordeal of having to celebrate with my dysfunctional family. Well, I haven’t celebrated with the family for twenty, but it took five years to cure the post traumatic stress. One thing I did like about Christmas dinner in Luxurybourg was the complete absence of turkey. Now here is one mostly useless bird. It is simply too big to roast. If the breast is nice and juicy, the legs are so bloody, they are still twitching and once the legs are cooked, the breasts are so dry you can clean windows with them. My friend Brian is the only person I know who consistently manages to produce a truly outstanding bird, but then he brines it for a decade, slow roasts it for 48 hours and then blow torches the skin into crispness (or something similarly involved). All of this is fine and dinde-y (bad pun) if I’m doing it at Frangi, but at home, I just want to stick the thing in the oven and go for a drink.

And that brings me back to dinner with the family and the pheasant my mother invariably roasted. Preceded by frog’s legs with lashings of butter, parsley and so much garlic it would have made a Frenchman faint, it was a feast to remember. The other memorable part was my mother. Christmas always makes her vociferously aggressive. The simple fact that no dinner can ever live up to a Hallmark Special drives her to an insatiable blood lust that even the garlic can’t cure. Recriminations, tears and aunts running through the snow in their rather too tight cocktail dresses, pearls scattering into the night, all of that was quite commonplace. In fact after a few years of this I didn’t even bother to wait for the end, when everyone would sit down to dinner, the women with mascara streaking down their faces, the men as drunk as they could decently get, exchanging long suffering glances and my mother, a triumphant glow lighting up her face, knife dangerously poised in hand, asking whether anyone would like a piece of breast? By that time I had normally changed the Christmas carols that were playing for Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana (much better suited to the mood of the moment), taken a leg off the pheasant, packed one of the better bottles and run off to a friend’s house.

Every year since I’ve left, my delusional mother calls and asks me whether I don’t miss those wonderful Christmases at home with the whole family and whether we couldn’t do that again. Maybe next year?

I’m going to confess to something horrible: I have been watching The Biggest Loser on and off for a few seasons. I know, as a chef this seems at best gleeful and at worst cynical. But then, I know what we’re talking about: I was a fatty once (and if you ask my brother, I still am) and I lost it all. Well, most of it anyway… So here’s the deal: When The Biggest Loser Asia was announced, I was, if not exactly excited, at least intrigued. We watch these American programs and let’s admit it, they are not exactly tailored to the Asian lifestyle. Most of us (me, the self-elected, possibly temporary Asian included) do NOT eat cereal with low fat, no carb, zero sugar “milk”. To us, a snack is a bowl of wonton noodles, not a low cal jello. I was looking forward to finding out how they incorporated the Asia culinary lifestyle into the show. Answer? Not at all. I admit I have only seen one show, but on that one, they showed “breakfast” and it was… wait for this… Cereal with low fat, no carb, zero sugar milk substitute. Not good news! Does that mean all we fatties have to stay home and nibble the stale crust of humility if we want to loose it all? Well, as far as new insights into dieting in Asia were concerned - total loser.

Then came the training sessions, starting off with Kristy (what’s up with the spelling!) who is, it seems, a certified (or was that certifiable) trainer having her one ton team, whose sole exercise to that moment consisted of opening another bag of crisps, doing jumping jacks, squats and crunches in quick succession. Then it seemed to surprise her that her team were all out of breath. I’m not quoting verbatim, but it went something like this: “Look at you guys, you’re all out of breath! Just listen to you guys! I can’t believe it.” And neither could I. Now, I’m not a trainer, but even I know that endurance is something one builds slowly, one can’t simply force it. What really got my goat was that here is a trainer who tells her clients off for something they can’t possibly help. They’re fat and out of shape and getting off the sofa will make them wheeze like an asthma patient in a cornfield, so what’s the big surprise?

By the second half of the show, Ms. Kristy Kreme’s unrelenting “I can’t believe you can’t even do THAT” bears its inevitable fruit and the contestants tell the camera: “Team morale is really low at the moment”. I watch some more and I suddenly realise: Kritsy is in reality Marjorie, the inspiring presence in the “Fat Fighters” skit in “Little Britain”! - Total Loser.