The Art of the St Andrews Dinner Party

The dinner party is a quintessential part of the St Andrews student experience. Myriads of flats piled on top of one another, interlaced and rarely soundproofed, are filled to the brim every night of the week with students dining on gourmet food en masse. Jazz filters in through the background, candlesticks are artistically placed in disused wine bottles, foie de gras and intricately iced desserts are scattered across tables, and fire doors, much to the chagrin of HMO-obsessed landlords, are propped open by rocks collected from the beach. Preparation is hidden. The bright minds of St Andrews have thrown their windows open to smoke out of them, releasing the sounds, smells, and sheer superiority of the students inside to passersby below. 

In my experience of visiting other university towns, this is not the average coming-together of a weeknight evening. What is it that inspires us St Andrews students to cultivate not only an elaborate dinner menu but the drapery and atmosphere to accompany it, too? Although not endemic to this corner of northeast Scotland, the dinner party seems to have taken hold of this student population with particularly brute force. Is it simply the absence of clubs that leaves us with no other choice but to gather and stretch meal plans to the wee hours of the morning? With the plethora of over twenty pubs and bars as an alternative to a black-tie dinner in your best friends’ flat, I think not. 

Perhaps it is the aesthetically-driven nature of St Andrews that encourages such communal, artisanal dining. The singular beauty of the wind and rain-beaten cliffs is ingested as students hurry from seminar to lecture to, inevitably, dinner party, and then regurgitated back in the form of ridiculously specific themes and personalised place settings. It is a natural consequence of living in such an isolated, appearance-oriented place; we cannot help the progression from simple shared meals to Great Gatsby levels of dinner party dedication. 

It is true that communal eating has long been a form of high culture: it is obvious why it has evolved so quickly in St Andrews, then. Like Roman Emperors and their entourage, stretched out on three benches around a central food table, students in St Andrews have created a haven for esoteric ideas about what it means to be a student. Hosting is a form of cultural capital and social status. The hosts, power-mad stage-managers of school plays, attempt to make their laborious dedication look effortless and for one ‘act’ to flow seamlessly into the next. Their guests take on the role of badly behaved toddlers admirably. Despite this potential for bad behaviour, dinner parties have a monopoly on the cultural and aesthetic consciousness of St Andrews students. Rather than bringing this tight-knit community together, it may be more apt to say that they have been reformed, in classic St Andrews fashion, to fit the students’ elitist needs. 

This pessimistic view ignores the sheer, innocent joy that eating together can bring to a group of people. Potluckstyle parties are a constant, and the communal act of creating one cohesive meal together as well as eating together is a double joy. For the students less concerned with Haus of Horrors in 601 and more interested in genuine conversation and connection, dinner parties offer a happy medium. Although some St Andrews dinner events more resemble a Roman Emperor's extravagance in communal dining, this rampant phenomenon stems ultimately from an innately human need to gather, particularly in the winter, when nights draw in and the outside world can be shut out. The chance to tell stories, to combine new groups of people, play games, test out new outfits, all while eating well, is not one that should be discouraged or turned down. Indeed, there is no end in sight for the supper party in St Andrews. 

Illustration by Ramona Kirkham