Seeking Input on How to Organize a Progressive Dinner

A progressive dinner generally involves moving location for each meal course. We have done this in our neighborhood: House 1 serves appetizers; House 2 serves soup/salad; House 3 serves the main entree (usually something that does not involve extensive side dishes, such as chili or spaghetti); and House 4 serves dessert. Each house also is responsible for serving an accompanying beverage. If enough people are participating, additional people can be assigned as "helpers" for each house to bring the beverage(s), help serve, etc. The best tip I can give is to try to serve food that can be prepared ahead of time, heated quickly or doesn't need heating, and easily served. Otherwise the "owners" of the house with a meal course cannot easily participate in going to the other courses.

I'm not sure if you and your family live close enough to do this sort of traveling throughout the meal. Nonetheless, progressives can be a lot of fun!

Hi L.,

I don't mean to sound thick, but I am not sure exactly what you mean by progressive dinner? My husband's family is too big to get together at any one spot, so we always have our holidays with them at an alternate location. For instance, Thanksgiving will actually be celebrated The Sunday after Thanksgiving day and will be held in a church basement. It is actually quite nice. There are already plenty of chairs and tables there, the gym is upstairs and free for us to use (lots of family basketball games), they have their own kitchen, so major dishes can be brought and then just reheated. Plus all the cleanup can be done right then with sinks. Plenty of bathroom space. It seemed it would be a little impersonal at first, but has really worked great. Central location for everyone and one family usually goes ahead and decorates to give it a nice feel. Also, my husband's family is from a small town, so this doesn't cost a million dollars!

While I have not yet actually run it, our block is in the prosess of hammering out a progressive dinner for the holidays as well.

Depending on the number of participants you have, you can try it a few different ways. First of all, you'll want to be as geographically close as possible (otherwise, it can be a logistical nightmare). You can opt to have all houses serve or limit your courses and have the serving houses rotate from year to year. If you have each house serve, the trick is to KEEP IT LIGHT. For example, if you have 7 houses participating, you could serve one of each of the followign courses at each house: cocktails, hors d'oerves, soup, salad, entree, dessert and nightcaps. But, you wouldn't want to serve 4 different kinds of appetizers, or have the soup house serve in bread bowls, or have your entree house serving 6 items...everyone will be too uncomfortable to move!

Another option is to have something that is more like tapas, and have everyone serve a light appetizer (and small cocktails?). This way it would be more cost comparible for all the participants. You could even have every house come up with tehir own theme (ethnic, decade, alphabetical)...it can be really creative and fun!

Good Luck!

We do a neighborhood progressive dinner. We cater the main meal and serve it at multiple houses since we typically have 40 or 50 people. The caterer supplies warmers etc. We have appetizers at one house and dessert at another house. Depending on your house number, you bring either an appetizer or dessert. There is a set fee per person for the catered meal, and last year we did BYOB. I think it sounds like a fun holiday event for a large family. Catering the main meal would mean one family wouldn't get the majority of the work.

Hi L. -
My church used to have a progressive dinner every spring of which I extremely enjoyed. Everyone would start out with appetizers at the church and then two different homes would host soup and salad (1/2 of the group would go to one home and the other 1/2 to the other home. Another two homes would host the actual main course (again, 1/2 to one home and 1/2 to the other)and then the entire group would end up at our Pastor's home for a banquet of desserts. We were only supposed to spend one hour at each destination and the trick was not to fill up on appetizers or soup and salad - Some would actually miss dinner and go straight to the dessert home! Now the church and all the homes were fairly within a short distance from each other. mainly in one or two particular suburbs. Of course you can customize this to meet the needs of your family. I hope this gives you some ideas. please let me know how it turns out.
T.