{"id":302839,"date":"2025-12-07T07:28:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-07T07:28:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/302839\/"},"modified":"2025-12-07T07:28:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-07T07:28:08","slug":"christmas-dinner-in-a-restaurant-or-kitchen-carnage-at-home-food","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/302839\/","title":{"rendered":"Christmas dinner in a restaurant or kitchen carnage at home? | Food"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christmas dinner? At home or in a restaurant? It\u2019s at this juncture of the year, with Christmas<\/a> dinner hurtling towards us, that you may well find yourself muttering: \u201cWell, we could always go out!\u201d Who could blame any home cook for wanting to shove this great burden on to someone else\u2019s back, especially since every culinary TV show, magazine article and advertising break since mid-November has hammered home what a colossal faff Christmas dinner actually is. No, it\u2019s not just a slightly posh Sunday roast with a few more guests.<\/p>\n

Christmas dinner in the UK these days is more like a cross between dinner at Balmoral and 4 July at Mar-a-Lago. The table has to be heaving with holly-embossed crockery, the carrots must be bejewelled in star anise and Himalayan pink pepper, the turkey has to be brined in aromatic salt water and your roasties shaken in polenta and smothered in duck fat. If you\u2019re the designated martyr organising proceedings, field-marshalling everything and cooking this tinsel-strewn palaver, it is common to try instead to divert it all to the local pub, where they\u2019re doing \u201cturkey and all the trimmings\u201d for \u00a379 a head (and including a cracker and a pre-dinner \u201cglass of something sparkly\u201d).<\/p>\n

After several attempts at spending Christmas \u201cout\u201d, however, I\u2019m still on the fence as to whether or not it\u2019s really worth it. Chances are, if you\u2019re the designated cook, as I often am, you\u2019ll also find yourself equally burdened as the designated table-finder, taxi-booker and exasperated berk trying to get Aunt Agnes up to the Queen\u2019s Head by 3pm, mainly because she won\u2019t on any account miss the king\u2019s speech, won\u2019t eat turkey without bread sauce and would ideally like her Jim Reeves<\/a> cassette played over the pub\u2019s sound system.<\/p>\n

Agnes\u2019 demands will be paltry compared with those of your vegan cousin, however, or your father with Alzheimer\u2019s who may or may not keep his trousers on for the entire meal, and, of course, the teenager in the family, who will go missing on Christmas Eve and slink in the next day at 7pm with a love bite and hot rock burns down their Christmas jumper.<\/p>\n

I once paid the same price as a holiday in the Algarve for a two-person Christmas Day lunch at a fancy five-star hotel<\/p>\n

Ten years ago, I shepherded the Dent flock to a local pub in the Lake District for a twinkly table beside a log fire, where a traditional big bird and figgy pudding-type menu was served. The cooking was passable \u2013 soggy parsnips, dry turkey, over-sweet cranberry and a drought of gravy delivered in stingy jugs \u2013 and the service was just about sanguine, bearing in mind that not one hospitality person in history has ever truly wanted to work on the 25th. Perhaps that\u2019s the rub with Christmas dinner service: anyone working clearly drew the short straw.<\/p>\n

One year, I paid the same price as a short holiday in the Algarve for a two-person Christmas Day lunch at a fancy five-star London hotel. The dining room was classily decked out in twinkly lights, all gold and bronze, and there was nothing so naff as a Christmas tree, of course, but rather posh, frankincense room fragrance and crackers that cracked expensively, didn\u2019t have jokes but did have posh prizes such as silk scarves inside. The room was filled with unhappily married trophy wives, all plodding their way through turkey ballotine with fragments of cranberry sap \u2013 just one of 11 courses \u2013 and they kept us there for so long that the meal started eating into Twixmas. When we left, London was in a huge traffic jam , because thousands of people had driven in to see the lights, and I spent Christmas evening in a gridlock on the Holloway Road, instead of eating a Paxo<\/a> sandwich while lying horizontal and watching The Vicar of Dibley<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This year, meanwhile, I have already made two reservations for Christmas dinner and cancelled them both. That\u2019s mainly because I can\u2019t quite commit to taking Charles out to our local bistro for the annual blowout, despite being exhausted after filming MasterChef right up to the wire, because, well, I know that, by that stage of the festive delirium, there will be nowhere quite like home.<\/p>\n

The truth is, despite moaning about cooking Christmas dinner and the raggle-taggle bunch of family and friends who will inevitably appear with demands for a beef option because they don\u2019t like turkey, vegan roasties and something chocolatey and stacked high with gold leaf because they don\u2019t eat Christmas pudding, well, it turns out that I actually quite enjoy the kitchen carnage. It\u2019s a rare moment, when the plates go down and 10 dirty pans are coped with all at once, that I feel like a grown-up, and that I\u2019m doing something my mother, if she could see me, would be proud of \u2013 not least because I am carrying on the long line of angry matriarchs who, despite the odds, got Christmas done. You can let someone in a white hat take the strain with your sprouts and spare your angry tears, but where\u2019s the fun in that?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Christmas dinner? At home or in a restaurant? It\u2019s at this juncture of the year, with Christmas dinner…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":302840,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-302839","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302839\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/302840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}