As a phenomenon, tablescaping is not exactly new: think of 16th-century oil paintings of the opulent banquets of aristocrats and royalty. Yet the art of setting a table has lately experienced a firm resurgence, with even the most humble gatherings of friends on Instagram appearing straight out of a stylish magazine spread. Chef and food artist Laila Gohar—whose @lailacooks account has 273,000 followers—writes a column for the Financial Times’s magazine, How To Spend It, called “How to Host It,” in which the setting is just as important as the menu. Gallerist Alex Tieghi-Walker of TIWA Select will seat guests among ceramics or glassworks sourced from artists he admires. Whimsically arranged vegetables top crisp linen on the feed Site Specific Cooking.
The trend, like so many others, can be traced to the pandemic. From our homes, where we were trapped, some began to post images of the sourdough bread they had baked, the vegetables they had pickled in a jar, and hearty candlelit dinners for one. Some critics labeled this movement at the time as “quarantine austerity aesthetics”; now, more fanciful and even surrealist approaches have gained traction. Among the endless images of well-presented meals on Instagram, food sculptures recently became a sub-trend; posts of trompe l’oeil butter sculptures have gone viral. In Gohar’s world, mochi can be breasts and cakes can be made of sausages.
Julia Khan Anselmo, aka Feisty Feast, hosts dinners professionally out of Amsterdam, and has seen the trend of aesthetically-minded hosting on the rise, alongside an increased demand for her work (which she describes as “romantic, maximalist and old world”-inspired). “Covid was a real catalyst for this trend because people spent more time at home and wanted their experiences there to be beautiful,” she explains. “Suddenly, people were taking a new interest in homeware.” Indeed, Pinterest called it in their 2021 trend predictions report, citing a 105% increase in searches for gourmet food plating. The company’s verdict: “kitchen is the new Michelin.” Newer research shows that we are still seeking to replicate the type of “special” experiences that we might have at restaurants at home and hosting more regularly in 2023 than in previous years, perhaps due to a tightening economic climate.
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Meanwhile, as public events have become popular again, including in fashion, brands have pivoted to intimate dinners with Instagram-famous chefs or photogenic standing lunches over larger, more formal events. “The aesthetics of food have definitely become trendier,” says Monika Varšavskaja, a.k.a. @cuhnja, a Paris-based cook-slash-set-designer who works with fashion brands and galleries. She is mostly hired through PR agencies, a fact she believes is telling: food styling has become a mode of communication. “At fashion week,” she says, “people have many events in a day, so if you have food that’s not only tasty but visual, it touches more senses.”
Anselmo adds: “I think these dinners and tablescaping culture, this new part of bringing people together from brands, it’s really a marketing tool. A lot of these events are for influencers.” The cultural effect, she says, is that “people want to eat with their eyes, not their palettes” and that we are increasingly “very concerned with making things look a certain way,” sometimes at the expense of hospitality itself. “It can be suffocating or stifling,” she says of online trends in food presentation. “For that reason, Instagram can be a block—I try not to take my inspiration from online.”
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So, what do professional chefs-turned-tablescapers advise the average dinner party host to do? “There are no rules, so try not to get too caught up in the trap of perfection,” Anselmo advises. “Invest in beautiful serving dishes, quality linens, and a nice selection of glassware, and you’re halfway there.” But if that’s not possible, you could use a bed sheet as a table cloth, an upside-down bowl as a plinth, or some flowers or branches you find outside, she says. She recommends a book, The Rituals of Dinner by Margaret Visser, as a witty and fascinating take on why we eat the way we eat, “from the ancient Greeks to modern yuppies.” In a culture where Instagram trends can flatten our approach to staging a dinner party, perhaps it’s useful to remind ourselves of the nuanced history and culturally specific ways in which it is possible to dine.
This greater hunger for meaning, so to speak, may also explain why, on TikTok, food content that speaks to cultural heritage has proliferated. Unlike on Instagram, on TikTok, the arresting still life is less important than the process of cooking itself, the personality of the person doing it, and imaginative and sometimes silly food hacks.
However you choose to decorate a table, the most important thing, Anselmo says, is preparing both the table and the food in advance so you can be relaxed and present for your guests. “Timing is a key element to me,” she says. “Not waiting too long before another course arrives. There should be a pleasant overall flow, and with that, a flow in conversation.” The mark of a good dinner, she adds, is when “people are engaged with one another while enjoying the food.” And that, above all, is the reason we host—however the table may look.
On the advice above, I have invested in a tablecloth and a couple of candles. At a recent Sunday roast (a British tradition)—cooked on four hours sleep—I laid out the tablecloth, placed some flowers in a vase, and put my candles on the table in an antique candle holder. My friends quickly moved most of these items off of the table—so that we could better see one another, eye to eye, and to make room for the roast pork I had cooked. No one took photographs of the food (let alone the spartan table), but we did take photos of one another. As they left, having failed my first attempt to up my game at tablescaping, I mulled over one of life’s less important questions, but one that endures all the same: When hosting a dinner, is it chicer to make a big effort, or to appear to have made very little?
For the everyman who likes to host dinner parties, this aestheticism can create a certain pressure. I look upon them with appreciation and wonder probably because I am so incapable of achieving the same “Oh this? I just threw it together” kind of elegance myself. I would consider myself an above-average cook, but I am incapable of setting a beautiful table. I could go even further: I am bad at creating ambiance all round. Considering which tablecloth to use would come at the expense of an edible dessert. Curating a guestlist feels natural, a bespoke dinner party playlist less so. More than once, my partner has had to remind me that it might be nice to light a candle. Perhaps I will never have—as The New Yorker put it of Gohar last year—“exquisite taste”.
The popular UK writer Sheena Patel has described the evolution of this trend in the years since. Writing in the food journal Vittles in June 2023, she describes seeing photographs of raw ingredients and seasonal vegetables on her feed, purchased—of course—from the farmers market, and presented—of course—resplendently. (“I’d prefer rich people to be ostentatious and unapologetic, not try to ape simplicity,” writes Patel).
When in doubt, Varšavskaja returns to her Slavic roots for inspiration. “If I have carte blanche I like to reimagine dishes from my childhood.” I ask for further advice, and she explains it’s simply a case of meeting yourself where you’re at. “For me, the table is a white canvas, I like to play with food. My style is minimal, clean, and I compensate for that with popping colours or something playful. But I understand that, for people who are not chefs or so technical, it might be easier to focus on soft lighting or flowers.”