Last August, as I sat on the deck of a ferry on the windy, calm Aegean Sea, I began dreaming of hosting a dinner party back home in Brooklyn. I had just spent nearly two months traveling solo through the Balkans, where food culture is heavily influenced by the Ottoman Empire, Italy, and the Adriatic. I rarely felt lonely on my trip, but there were plenty of meals I wanted to share with my closest friends, so I sent them photos of the food, almost like digital postcards saying, “I wish you were here!”
When I finally invited them over for “A Very Balkan Dinner Party” this winter, I looked back at those snapshots and put together a menu: stuffed fermented cabbage leaves (a winter version of the stuffed grape leaves we enjoyed all summer), crispy börek stuffed with spinach and salty cheese, roasted peppers with kaymak from Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, smoky Macedonian eggplant dip, arugula seasoned with pumpkin seed oil in honor of Slovenia, and poppy seed ice cream with sour cherry compote inspired by the corn I ate on a scorching hot day in Belgrade, Serbia.
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A meal in Sarajevo, including the peppers served later at a dinner party.
On a snowy Sunday, I ventured out to Parrot Coffee Grocery, a Balkan spot in Queens, and chatted for a while with the Romanian store attendant about stuffed cabbage and her favorite brand of Ivar. Before my friends arrived, I put on a Balkan playlist and prepared a small handmade cheese knife and an Albanian ceramic bowl I bought in Kosovo. My friend asked me to tell her a little about each dish while we ate. After dessert, I introduced my guests to the custom of toasting with raki, which I learned at Alpeta, a family-run winery where we stayed in Albania. For one night, I felt like I was traveling again, and taking my friends with me.
As I asked around about these dinner parties, I heard from more than a dozen travelers who have hosted similar gatherings, using ingredients they brought home and recreating dishes to share travel memories with friends and family around the table at home.
Food can help draw someone into the travel experience, says Liz Furman, a toy company worker who hosted a Greek dinner party with her husband for his 30th birthday after a trip to Santorini.
“This is our preferred way of sharing our journey rather than showing a bunch of photos,” Furman says.
For Jerome Hulme, a semi-retired clinical psychologist, photo slides were an essential element of the roughly 20 dinner parties he hosted with his late wife, Beverly Hulme, after trips to countries like Italy, Russia, China and Peru. The dinners at their homes in Queens and Long Island followed a set pattern: Beverly, a librarian and cooking teacher, oversaw the cooking and prepared a slide show of his travels that Jerome would share between dinner and dessert.
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Tea drunk during Balkan banquets.
The catalyst for the memorable party was a conference in Peru in the 1960s. After returning to New York, Beverly met a Peruvian chef in Queens and learned how to make mazamora morada (purple corn pudding). Later, over dinner, Jerome looked at images of the Nazca Lines, geoglyphs carved into Peru's coastal plain, and told the story of a chance luncheon he had with Maria Reiche, a renowned archaeologist who studied the lines.
For some, these dinner parties are an opportunity to cook with ingredients from the other side of the world. In the early 2000s, Annette Tan, a Singapore-based food writer, would buy ingredients while traveling because she found it hard to source the ingredients she read about in cookbooks by authors like Claudia Roden and Paula Wolfert.
“I couldn't cook. [those dishes] “We weren't even traveling then,” Tan explains.
One Christmas, she cooked timballo, from Lynn Rosette Kasper's The Splendid Table: Recipes from Emilia-Romagna, the Heartland of Northern Italian Food, for 12 cousins, with porcini mushrooms, Parmesan, ham, and heirloom tomatoes she'd brought back from Italy, and another time, she treated friends to oxtail stew and a Western-style pasta dish, using miso and mentaiko she'd picked up on a trip to Japan.
For people like cookbook literary agent Sally Ex, these meals are a way to give back to the places they've traveled. In 2007, Ex and her mother, Lisa, visited Vietnam as part of a culinary delegation for Peace Trees Vietnam, a nonprofit that works to educate and clear landmines. After returning to their home in western Massachusetts, the couple made banh trang le spring rolls (wrapped in mesh rice paper) and a banana blossom salad for a fundraiser for the group that drew 30 people at Lisa's home.
“This is ingrained in Lisa and I. When we go out somewhere, we have to bring it back and share it and make a difference in our lives and the lives of the people we go with. [eat] ” says Mr. Ex.
Meanwhile, Caroline Eden, a writer who was in Ukraine just before the 2022 Russian invasion and has traveled extensively in the region, hosted two dinners for eight people at the kitchen table of her Edinburgh, Scotland, home to raise funds for #CookForUkraine. Participants discussed the war over local dishes like pickled mushrooms, challah, and Black Sea börek, which are featured in Eden's cookbook, “Black Sea: Dispatches and Recipes, Through Darkness and Light.”
These meals don't necessarily require extensive kitchen experience; if you shop smart while traveling, cooking is optional. The night after I returned to New York from Amsterdam, Irina Grushevaia, senior social media manager at Punch (owned by Vox Media and Eater), hosted a “Back from 'Dam” party with a ton of snacks.
“The things I brought with me tell the story of what I did in Amsterdam,” says Gruchebeier. The cheese and stroopwafels are reminiscent of a bike trip, and the tea and elderflower lemonade concentrate are reminiscent of a visit to the botanical gardens. While his friends ate snacks, Gruchebeier showed me watercolors he'd painted during his trip.
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Food Memories from Amsterdam by Irina Grushevaia
While many of these dinners focus on a single destination, giving guests a taste of the place they're visiting, sometimes the food reflects the journey itself. After completing a long journey to Antarctica last December, Tan served conserva and olive oil she bought in Portugal, wine from a stop in Buenos Aires, and chocolate truffles purchased during a quick layover in Zurich. Her dinners are as much about sharing the experience as they are about specific dishes.
“I like the idea of sharing a part of the holiday with them and encouraging them to go sometimes,” Tan says. “It's a physical endorsement.”
Devra First is a Brooklyn-based food and travel writer. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Bon Appétit, Conde Nast Traveler, and many other publications. She is the co-author of The Jewish Holiday Table: A World of Recipes, Traditions & Stories to Celebrate All Year Long.
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