Cooking in the Wrong Century

For the hostess, food has always been about growing up. From the pancakes your grandmother made you, dolloped with jam, to the salty glug of your first oyster. Now, poised at the brink of midlife, the hostess prepares for a dinner party in her new apartment. With a hunger for the finer things in life, she folds linen napkins into neat triangles, decorates the table with wildflowers and puts on a playlist that projects effortless cool, eager for the envy and distinction of her discerning friends. But her hard-won composure begins to falter when her guests arrive drunk and late, downing bottles of her perfectly cooled wine and trailing water over the floor. Here comes the chain-smoking professor who never says the right thing, the husband glued to his smartphone for the whole meal, the wife who makes a secret pass at your boyfriend. As polite chatter and social preening gives way to sexual tension and lost inhibitions, the hostess struggles to maintain control over an evening far beyond her wildest imaginings. Cooking in the Wrong Century is a deliciously weird satire of a dinner party on a warm summer's night in Vienna. Riotously funny, it casts its merciless gaze on the striving at the heart of our domestic gatherings and the meals that make us.