How we stopped eating together – and why it’s so important

The dining table is the site of laughter, tears, triumph and failure. If we stop gathering there, we’ll lose more than a place for dinner

‘When you are setting out in life, you need a bed – but more importantly, you need a table. A table is where things happen,’ says the food writer Diana Henry. We are sitting at her long kitchen table in north London, sharing croissants and coffee in the space that she’s cleared amid piles of papers, bills and books. Her whole life is here, she explains. Writing, research, eating, socialising – even her make-up and Netflix viewing happen on this tableclothed surface, sandwiched between bookshelves and her kitchen counter.
Yet while Henry is an extreme case, being someone who develops recipes and writes about food for a living (‘My life is not demarcated, because I write about food, which is part of domesticity,’ she points out, gesturing simultaneously to her laptop and oven), her words point to a more universal truth.
The table is the stage on which so much of life is set, from first dates to weddings, first homes to family dinners. It is where we eat and drink, of course, but more than that, it is where we communicate. We may exchange a few words while cooking, getting ready for bed or lounging on the sofa, but the big conversations – and subsequent decisions – happen between mouthfuls, amid the clatter of cutlery and plates. Post-pandemic, more of us are working from home than ever before – and not everyone can afford a desk, or uses a desk, even if they have one. My boyfriend and I have a shed office and haven’t used it once because our kitchen table is warmer, lighter and closer to the kettle. ‘My sons have desks in their rooms, but when they are at home and have work, they come to the table,’ says Henry. ‘The table is where everyone comes back to.’
This is certainly true of the table I grew up around at my dad’s, and which has seen our family through divorce, single fatherhood, remarriage and refurbishment. When plans for the last were being finalised early last year, my stepmum sent me an urgent text: ‘Dad wants to get rid of the kitchen table. Try to persuade him not to’ – and at the prospect of losing this space in which we had eaten, laughed, worked, fallen out and forged a new family, I had an almost physical response. When we think about kitchen tables, our minds tend to default to the dishes or people; we rarely consider the physicality of the thing itself. Yet with time and use, a good table becomes a character in its own right. It’s part of the family, as much as it’s part of the furniture.
‘It’s like a car,’ says the TV chef and author of For the Love of Food, Paul Ainsworth. ‘People think of cars as posh or fast, or a means to get from A to B – but they come to be part of your life as a family.’ A few months ago, his young daughter refused to put a cloth under the paper she was colouring in, on their kitchen table, and her brightly coloured pens soaked through to the wood. ‘She tried to scrub it clean, but it just made it worse,’ he laughs. ‘There’s a proper patch there now – but that’s the magic of it. That will be a funny memory for as long as we have that table, which will be a long time.’ It’s a table for life, just like my dad’s, and it will accumulate more memories.
Ainsworth is well used to the kitchen table being all things to all family members. He grew up in a B&B, which his parents ran ‘from the table. My mum would press the sheets, pillowcases and so on there, my dad would do the bookkeeping there, and all our meals and conversations were there. We never even used the lounge.’ Ainsworth could tell the time of day and who was home simply by what was on the kitchen table – an experience I’m familiar with, having grown up in a house where the table was as much a dumping ground as it was a place to commune. Dad’s legal papers, our schoolwork, shopping bags, coffee cups and old envelopes scrawled with instructions served as runes in a large family whose members often passed like ships in the night, with exception of mealtimes. Instinctively, it is still the first place I head to see who’s in when I go home.
The table placed in the dining room is not quite the same. It can be beautiful, convivial – even meaningful – but it’s not the heart of the household. Perhaps that’s why dining rooms have been dying out in the UK in recent years, with homeowners converting them into open-plan spaces or offices. ‘You can’t live in two rooms at once – and as the kitchen is where food is generated, so it is where conversation and energy is generated,’ says the kitchen designer Johnny Grey. Where dining rooms are designed with one function in mind, a kitchen is a looser, more intimate space – and that intimacy feels less formal. Just think about house parties: even if the kitchen is tiny, and the drinks table purposely stationed in the living room to avoid the inevitable bottleneck between the fridge and the sink, people know it’s where the real action takes place.
When Grey designs a kitchen, he starts with the table. ‘Get the table right, then you can start thinking about everything else,’ he explains. He reminds me (as many will, during the course of researching this article) of Fergus Henderson’s famous line, ‘but the table comes first!’ – allegedly uttered in horrified response to the idea of new homeowners prioritising a sofa or television. When Fortnum & Mason played host to his restaurant St John, while its own space was being refurbished last year, Henderson insisted on transferring the tables. ‘That physical shift made it feel like the same place,’ says Bre Graham, a St John regular, food writer and the author of Table for Two.
It’s a concept Graham is familiar with, having had grandparents who lived all over the world and moved their dining table with them, at great cost. ‘It was stability,’ Graham reflects. ‘Whenever and wherever I visited, it made sense.’ An architect by training, Henderson is more aware than most of the connection between furniture and mood – but you don’t have to have eaten bone-marrow toast off one of St John’s dark wooden tables to feel that. Everyone knows food tastes better when in keeping with people, atmosphere and place.
‘A table for me is one of the most natural yet divine spaces to connect people. It should create connection,’ proclaims Raymond Blanc, the chef owner of Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons. Though two-Michelin-starred and eye-wateringly high-end, Le Manoir is beloved for its more relaxed, informal approach to fine dining; for food that fuels, rather than frustrates, conversation. The tables are key to this, he explains. ‘I couldn’t bear to create a place where luxury undermines joy, because for food to be enjoyed there must be love and laughter. I want the table to be a catalyst for this; to be conducive to fun. Too often, fine restaurants feel like a church, creating behaviour that is different and unnatural.’
This fine French philosophy boils down into key specifics, says Blanc. Like his concise menus (‘I don’t like 15 courses; how can you talk?!’), his tables are small relative to many Michelin-starred restaurants. ‘Size can either unite or divide, and the conversation becomes different. Our tables are 75cm, which provides comfort, but your partner is still close enough to play footsies and whisper, “I love you.”’ His tables are also oval or round (‘square tables are limiting’) and the pool of warm light on each one has a 30cm to 50cm radius. If a floral arrangement looks too stiff, Blanc has been known to remove some stems to loosen it, just as he has gentleman’s jackets.
‘You remember the gastronomy of the ’80s and ’90s, where people wore a three-piece suit? I’d go around the dining room loosening their ties and removing their jackets. Formality kills joy,’ he continues seriously, ‘and when I walk into my restaurant, I want to feel the volume of happiness. I want to touch it.’
It might seem a stretch to connect Le Manoir’s high-end tables to the rough, wooden table of Blanc’s childhood home, but he insists that is the bedrock of his approach. ‘All Le Manoir’s values were given to me by my mother, who saw food as an act of love, and that table as the space in which to deliver it.’ Every evening young Blanc would eat with his family, and hear the conversation grow louder and more colourful as the meal wore on. ‘Just by listening to the conversation, you could tell what course we were on. They’d start lightly, politely, over an aperitif and crudités. Then a main course of religion, garnished with politics, and sex for dessert – at which point my Catholic mother would leave the room!’ he laughs. So formative is this experience, he recounts it in his introduction to Le Manoir’s menus, in the hope it will set the mood, just like his table design and setting.
Grey calls the idea that design can dictate behaviour ‘affordance’: ‘a lovely, medieval word not used much in kitchen design. Good designers nudge behaviour, and that’s what a good table does: creates and affords opportunities for the people around it.’ To this end, his ideal size and shape of a table align with Blanc’s. ‘Sharp corners trigger off a subconscious fight-or-flight response, but soft curves relax the mind. An oval shape allows space for dishes and candles, and it’s inclusive.’ His philosophy also reflects the nature of his childhood meals, when his father would insist that everyone got heard. ‘I learned a lot around our table; how to accept criticism without getting stressed, how to take a joke, how to take turns,’ he continues. Though he and his many siblings could and did ‘send each other up and be very rude’, the table served as a civilising influence.
Which makes the gradual disappearance of the table from British life all the more concerning. Last year, a survey by HelloFresh revealed less than a third of Brits eat their evening meal around a table, while 48 per cent have it in front of the TV. Meanwhile, a glance around any restaurant or café will show that for today’s children, phones and consoles are the new ‘civilising influence’. One can see the appeal, for both parties. Kids are quiet and content, and parents can converse freely. But if children don’t have to communicate around a table, how can they learn how to? Much has been written about the importance of boredom to creativity, and the same could be said of conversation. Only by engaging with the people and environment around us can we hope to ask interesting questions ourselves.
‘It’s the only place you communicate,’ observes Diana Henry. ‘If you’re cooking, you are not communicating. If you are watching TV, you are not communicating. The place that makes you communicate is the table – and the absence of that communication is obvious.’ She recalls an ex-boyfriend who came home from work later and later – to the point where she ceased to cook, and he just ate crackers. ‘It showed how out of kilter we were. We weren’t treating the table properly.’
The food writer Skye McAlpine has authored three cookbooks, all centred on A Table: … in Venice, … for Friends, … Full of Love. Her own dining table, in the open-plan kitchen/living space at her home in south London, is ‘made out of old wooden floorboards that we knocked together, then laid on trestle legs; it is neither grand nor expensive, but we love it, and it is the setting for our meals together.’
McAlpine is a legendary dinner-party-giver, with her table, which extends to seat 32, always adorned with piles of fruit, candles and pretty bud vases. But it’s long and narrow, so that conversations can be had in groups or pairs all the way along, cosily. It’s also where she and her two young sons create and eat meals.
There is the idea of a table being a living thing; something that needs to be looked after if it is to fulfil its potential. ‘You have to take care of the table,’ Henry says, brushing a few croissant crumbs off her own. ‘It’s raw oak, and I bought it in 2009 from Benchmark, which was co-founded by Terence Conran. They designed it to get messy and stained with time – but that’s not me. I sand it every so often,’ she confesses. For Henry, taking care of the table means covering it with a nice tablecloth (she owns many) and an abundance of colourful, delicious dishes. ‘Set out on the table, they feel like offerings.’
For Graham, it means a candle and flowers, even if there’s just two people. ‘Lighting the candles, folding the napkins is therapeutic, and creates that shift in the day, particularly when you’re both working from home. There’s something so lovely about the intimacy of entering and sharing that space.’
Outside of the home, table settings seem even more significant. Being able to tailor his tables has been a dream for Ainsworth, who has had his fine-dining restaurant, Paul Ainsworth at No 6, for almost two decades, but could only afford bespoke tables three years ago. ‘I’m glad it took that long. I’m glad I had to work for it. They’re like trophies,’ he says of his round, soft leather-topped tables. ‘They’re not utilitarian or fancy; they are beautiful.’ They set expectations for his diners, who can look forward to food which is equally beautiful without being overly fussy; and they keep Ainsworth ‘humble’, he says. ‘I look out from the pass at the restaurant now, and they remind me of what it took to get here.’
There is, these days, a preoccupation with ‘tablescaping’, as it has become known – particularly at wedding breakfasts, which have perhaps the most talked-about tables in life. Georgie Reames is the co-founder of Savile Rose, an events agency that has planned weddings for many of the great and the good. For her, an ideal tablescape is a case of ‘first impressions as a couple. When you walk into the dining room, you are subconsciously taking in how they’ve chosen to present themselves: the names, calligraphy, placement, wedding favours and so on.’ Yet she concedes social media has played a large part in fuelling this trend: ‘Some couples want a beautiful tablescape so people can Instagram it.’
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I am struck by how much time and money people will invest in a table that stages just one scene in their lives, when the humble dining table sees so many acts, exits and entrances. By way of contrast, famed food writing duo Olia Hercules and Joe Woodhouse spent very little on their wedding tables (at the sadly closed restaurant Laughing Heart), but ‘are rich in tables’ at their home in east London. Their dining table is a cross-section of an old oak tree, with a beautiful live wood edge. ‘There is the clean half, which we use when people come for dinner, then there’s the part covered with wine and paint stains,’ Woodhouse continues. ‘That is the part we live in.’
Needless to say, we intervened after my stepmum’s Save Our Table text last year, and a week ago, I celebrated my 36th birthday around the same table I’d turned six at. I sat in the same seat, with the same people plus a few welcome additions in the form of our stepmum, stepdad and partners, and rested my feet on the same ledge my brother fought me for as soon as his legs were long enough to reach. I saw the grooves I’d created with pens, pencils and stressed fingernails over the years, and felt a sense of continuity, despite the refurbishment; despite changes in my family, me and my surroundings. I was 36 and six; growing up, yet deeply rooted in this place and the people I love most in the world.
I was home.
Clare Finney is the author of Hungry Heart: How the Food We Love Shapes Our Lives (Quarto, £9.99), available from The Telegraph Bookshop
Illustration by Tomi Um