High Spirits

An open invitation to caterers: Your services are cordially requested by dinner party hosts throughout the nation. Menu selections vary, but your clientele will generally be upscale consumers. No RSVP required.

Hungry for more information? We're happy to dish it out: Small dinner parties are enjoying increasing popularity of late, and caterers are enthusiastically satisfying the demand. Indeed, the National Restaurant Association is projecting a sizzling 5.3 percent increase in such catering this year.

What's cooking? Michael Roman of the Chicago food-service consulting firm CaterSource points to rampant anti-smoking regulations in restaurants as a key ingredient in the dinner party's resurgence. Rather than sit through yet another meal with the lights out, plenty of puffers-and their friends-are opting instead to host their own catered affairs.

"People are taking the easy way out and bringing [the party] back into their homes, yachts or whatever," Roman observes.

No-nicotine policies aren't the only reason for the popularity of small dinner parties, however. Roman also cites pricey restaurant-mandated gratuities and the desire for conversation-friendly atmospheres as other factors.

"It's very hard to converse in a restaurant in some cases-it's just too noisy," he notes. "The idea [now] is, Let's eat and let's talk."

Just don't do both at the same time.

This article was originally published in the July 1996 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: High Spirits.