New Year’s Eve is our favourite time of the year: there aren’t as many awkward family conversations/argument as at Christmas, you get to see friends, and, there is a real feeling of togetherness and new beginnings across the whole city. And, like all great events in the year, food plays an important role. Let us guide you in what food to enjoy for New Year’s Eve.
4000 years of getting rowdy
New Year’s Eve has been celebrated for nearly 4000 years and food and drink have always played a big part in the celebration. The Ancient Egyptians, for example, had a festival of drunkenness to mark the occasion, while in Spain it is held as custom to gobble 12 grapes – one for each strike of the clock at midnight. Nowadays, the food is really there to soak up the copious quantities of alcohol that people consume, but that doesn’t make it any less important to eat well. Here are some of our favourite food to enjoy for New Year’s Eve.
- Canapés. No party is complete without canapés. Firstly there to help soak up the first glasses of champagne, a good canapé can be more than delicious in its own right. Favourites of ours include the classic cheese and pineapple stick or, for a classier look, smoked salmon and cream cheese blinis.
- A roast chicken. Every party host knows that the last thing you want to be doing – especially on a big night like New Year’s Eve – is scurrying around the kitchen trying to cook something complicated. The best solution is to go for something you can stick in the oven, take out and plate up, leaving your guests to feast on whatever deliciousness you’ve created. For that, nothing is much better than roast chicken with garlic and butter.
- Cheesecake. For afters, again you need something both easy to make and indulgent. The answer to that is always going to be a cheesecake. And, actually, a better solution to making one at home is to get yourself something special from a bakery. At Cat & The Fiddles Cakes you can choose from any number of cakes, including the ‘Modern Duke’s Pudding’, a dark and rich Oreo-based cheesecake, and Apple of My Eye, a cheesecake based on apple crumble.
- Punch. Drinks are the most important bit and again, unless you either have enough money to hire a mixologist to come around for the night or actively want to spend the whole evening in the kitchen mixing drinks, you should do something you can make in advance in huge quantities and let people help themselves to. Punch is the answer: warming, full of flavour, and, most importantly, as boozy or as light as you want to make it.
But if you’re lazy like us…
Hopefully, you should now be set to crack on with all the right food for a killer New Year’s Eve party. But, to be honest, the way to make your party as stress-free as possible is just to buy in. And here are our top tips for that. For a great roast chicken, go to Poulet, where you can get the bird cooked in a choice of sauce. And for punch? Get the Secret Lab Bistro Bar to mix you one.