Bring Fine Dining to Your Doorstep

When you picture fine dining, you often imagine sleek white architecture, minimalist interiors and almost microscopic plates of food. But have you ever dreamt that your kitchen could be the next best place in town to dine?

Why not bring fine dining to your home? You don’t have to break the bank to eat delicious food and enjoy good company. The key to successful fine dining is in the detail, so get your pen and paper out because you’re about to host the best dinner party of your life.

Choose the best ingredients

Creating the perfect dining experience doesn’t start at dinner, it starts hours before. First things first you need to prepare the menu. You can’t just throw a load of ingredients together and expect to make the perfect meal (unless you’re an experienced chef then I take that back). Think about possibly creating a theme to your menu, Italian and French menus are always a favourite, or get really creative and think outside the box.

Once you’ve decided what you’re cooking, it’s time to source the BEST ingredients around. Now this may take time and patience, but cooking with high quality ingredients is really what takes a dish from home cooking to restaurant quality. Consider an early rise and getting to the local market, or visit smaller stores such as butchers and greengrocers to get the freshest ingredients. Don’t forget, if you’re choosing specialist meals you may need to visit specialist stores or order ingredients online so you need to be prepared for this.

Restaurant cooking kits

Maybe like me you love to eat delicious food, but you aren’t the most creative cook. That’s okay because restaurants have created meal kits for people like us. As a result of the covid-19 lockdown restrictions, restaurants and other catering services were forced to get creative with their business and from this cooking kits have blossomed.

Despite the fact that lockdown restrictions are easing in many countries, several restaurants are still offering the option of bringing our favourite dishes home. Or, if you want to give it a go yourself from scratch, search for restaurant cookbooks.

Break out the fancy china 

If you really want to be extra with your dining experience then you need to bring a bit of bravado to the table, and not just when it comes to the food. Still got that old china up in the attic somewhere that has been passed down for generations? Now’s the time to use it.

Even if you don’t have any fancy china, and you don’t really want to break the bank to purchase any, there are plenty of other things you can do to dress the table:

• Create a floral centrepiece
• Dine by candlelight
• Lay out the full cutlery set
• Write name cards

 Drink pairing possibly?

 Now you can’t prepare the perfect fine dining experience without some lavish drinks that complement the menu. The first point of call would be to pair your dishes with wine, but why stop there? You could create a far more innovative menu by pairing your food with particular cocktails instead. Or add an aperitif or two to the menu, espresso and amaretti biscuits after dessert? You can be just as creative with the drinks as you can with the dishes.

Fine dining doesn’t have to be for the rich and famous. All of us deserve to have a taste of the finer things and this shouldn’t mean emptying your pockets of every last penny. So give the Michelin star restaurants a run for their money!