“You'd have to be a lunatic to do a meal for eight that was all stir-fried dishes. You will be exhausted. You will be at the wok at the stove the whole time. You won't talk to your guests.”
The Dinner Plan · Food & Beverage · October 2026
Asked how she plans a dinner party menu, Dunlop describes the Chinese principle of maximum variety and minimal repetition, then turns to logistics. Make cold dishes and stews ahead, scale those up, and keep it to one or two stir-fries.
Transcript
…delicious umami flavour. In that salad dressing, so in the book, I've done a sort of version of French leeks vinaigrette, but with that sauce. It's also incredible on lettuce, on, you know, just sliced tomatoes. You can finish it off with a scattering of toasted sesame seeds. Amazingly delicious.
When you have a dinner party, how do you think about which dishes to put together in a menu?
…I fancy making and then think how they'll, you know, imagine how they'll go together. And then what else does this meal need? You know, if you want to cook like a Chinese restaurant, then you can have about one dish for each person. But you can also simplify it by scaling up some dishes and just making more of some of those dishes. But the really important thing is to think logistically, because you'd have to be a lunatic to do a meal for eight that was all stir-fried dishes. You will be exhausted. You will be at the wok at the stove the whole time. You won't talk to your guests. So I always think logistically, so I always make some cold dishes, which are very important in the cuisine of Sichuan and many other regions. And they can be made in advance, often the day before and just assembled at the last minute. And you can also scale them up as much as you want. So you can do a part. With cold dishes. It's also really good to do some kind of stew, a slow-cooked meat stew…
That's so interesting. And of course, many of these things that you would make a head, you could also make a head for yourself for a weeknight. What are some recipes in this book that you could put in the fridge the day before and eat over the course of a couple of days?
As far as I'm concerned, one of the best dishes in the whole world is Sechuani's Yu Xiang Chieza, fish fragrant eggplants. So that's eggplants, which are traditionally deep-fried until they're all golden and buttery, and then mixed up in the wok with a sauce made from pickled chilies or chili bean…
Those sound amazing. What do you throw together if you don't have anything in the fridge and you just need a quick meal that's really easy?
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