The Salt Lake holiday table: a chef’s guide to hosting the night instead of working it
Every December I get the same call. Someone has twenty people coming, one oven, and a plan that only works if nothing goes wrong. Something always goes wrong. The turkey needs another forty minutes, the sides are cold, and the host spends the evening in the kitchen listening to their own party through a doorway.
That is the actual problem with holiday hosting. Not the cooking. The scheduling.
Here is how I think about it, and most of this works whether you hire anyone or not.
Count your oven, not your recipes
The single most common mistake is building a menu that needs more oven than the house has. People plan dish by dish, and every dish sounds reasonable on its own. Then it is four in the afternoon and six things want 375 degrees at the same time.
Before you commit to a menu, write down every dish that needs the oven, the temperature, and how long. If the total does not fit in the hours you actually have, the menu is wrong. Not the timing. The menu.
The fix is usually one or two swaps. A braise that holds happily for an hour beats a roast that demands to be carved the second it comes out. A room-temperature vegetable dish is not a lesser dish. It is a dish that gave you your oven back.
Salt Lake is high enough to matter
At roughly 4,300 feet, water boils around 204 degrees instead of 212. That sounds academic until your braise takes an extra hour and your guests are eating bread at eight o’clock.
Practical version: anything simmered or boiled runs long, so start it earlier than the recipe says. Baked goods rise faster and can collapse, so pull them a touch sooner and check early. Roasts are the least affected, which is one more argument for building the night around one.
None of this is exotic. It just has to be planned for rather than discovered at dinnertime.
Make-ahead is a structure, not a shortcut
The dishes that taste better on day two are doing double duty. Braises, stews, most soups, cranberry anything, compound butters, dressings, spice pastes. Anything with collagen or acid tends to improve overnight.
What does not hold: anything fried, anything with a crisp element, delicate fish, dressed greens. Those are your day-of work, and there should be very little of it.
Build the menu so that eighty percent of it is finished before anyone arrives. Then the last hour is assembly and heat, which is the only part you can do while still being a person at your own party.
Feed the room you actually have
Ask about dietary needs early enough to design around them rather than patch over them. There is a real difference between a menu that has a vegetarian option and a menu where the vegetarian dish is something people fight over.
In Salt Lake specifically, plan for the drinkers and the non-drinkers with equal seriousness. A table where half the guests get a considered beverage and half get sparkling water is a table that told half the room they were an afterthought. That is a solvable problem and worth solving.
Buy your ingredients on a weekday
Holiday week grocery runs are their own punishment. Order proteins ahead from a butcher and pick them up early in the week. Produce a day or two out is fine for most things. Anything shelf stable can be done weeks ahead.
The goal is that the day before the party involves no store. If you are shopping on the twenty-third, the schedule already failed.
Decide what you are willing to hand off
Some people love the cooking and hate the cleanup. Some want the whole thing handled. Both are legitimate, and it is worth being honest with yourself before you commit to a night.
What I would say from the other side of it: the part most hosts regret losing is not the cooking. It is the sitting down. Whatever you plan, protect that. Build a menu you can walk away from for two hours, or bring in help for the stretch that keeps you standing.
A good holiday table is not the one with the most dishes. It is the one where the host is at it.
Steve Ingber is the owner and executive chef of MileHighCook, which runs private chef dinners and events in Salt Lake City and across the Mountain West.
Dining and Cooking