The Art of Hosting | How to Host a Dinner Party with Kyra Smolkin

Welcome to Tizori Home. Today we are bringing you our next episode in our series, The Art of Hosting, where guests walk us through their individual approach to hosting. And today I'm joined by Kira, who you might remember from her home tour on our channel from, it's been two years now. It's been a while, yeah. So if you haven't seen her home tour, I'll put it down in the description below. You'll have to check it out after this. What is your favorite thing about hosting, would you say? Honestly, just bringing our friends together. That's it. It's really not about being overly fussy or putting on the most grandiose tablescape ever. It's literally just about having our friends over, getting people together. And we also love cooking. But again, nothing crazy. We never do anything over the top. Just fresh food, simple. We do like to make most things from scratch. But it's just cooking and having our friends over. That's it. I love that so much. And I really like to make sure we're super organized ahead of time. So I'll pull out all of the dishware that we're gonna use and I label it. So like, this obviously says steak and pasta, where the sweet potatoes are gonna go. And then I always have my linens pressed ahead of time because that's like the last thing you want to be doing at the last minute. You're not like rifling through your cabinet, trying to find a plate big enough for the things that you need. So it's like the easiest little tip that you could possibly have. Well, I'm so excited to see it all set, but I know that we need to get cooking. Yes. So why don't we go into your kitchen and your prep room and see what we're gonna do for food? Yeah, let's go. All right. So today we're doing two different salads because we have one couple that can't eat dairy coming. So we're doing like a dairy-free salad and then my kale Caesar, which like everyone in my life has had 1000 times. But I just have certain things that I make almost every time because they're like easy and you just like, everyone likes them. Yes. And then we're doing steak and we're doing shrimp and we're doing fresh pesto pasta and Japanese sweet potatoes. It sounds delicious. These are Japanese sweet potatoes. I'm just gonna drizzle them with olive oil and a little bit of sugar, which is what one of our chef friends just told me to do. I've never done that before, but I'm gonna trust him. And then really what is gonna make these interesting is when they're out of the oven, I'll top them with a miso butter and bonito flakes, which is a direct copy of a dish from Rory's Place in Ojai, which is one of our favorite restaurants. Also our son's name, but it was so good. I've had it a couple of times and I was like, I need to try to recreate it. Now what's the sugar supposed to do? Did he explain? It's gonna help like caramelize it a little bit. Yeah, I'm not gonna do too much, but we want it to get nice and crispy and just have some extra flavor, but then we'll get a bunch of flavor from the miso butter as well. Sounds amazing. And now these are going in the oven. Okay, let's go. After you. Thank you. This is so beautiful. Thank you. Can you just talk to me a bit about what inspired this table? I usually just go for like a color scheme. So this is obviously green and blue. I feel like my go-to is usually like some form of blue. So this is like a very classic table for me. So like a floral mixed with a plaid or a stripe is a go-to for me too. I know it definitely reflects the style of your home because of that, like you said, those mixed patterns. What would be your top tip for someone who wants to host more, maybe is a little nervous too, what would your encouragement to them be? I think the more often you do it, the less intimidating it is. So just start and like, if you wanna start for the first time, like if you haven't hosted a ton, I know some people haven't, either choose to like make it really cute and then order food or the opposite. Like make all your food if that's what you wanna do, but like, don't worry about it looking nice. Like your friends will love just getting together. So I feel like sometimes doing everything is a lot. So just like choose one thing. Like we've been to dinner parties where people just order the food and that's so fun. Like no one cares. It does not need to be homemade. You can make it super cute, you can have a theme, you can, you know, have a whole vision, but then just like order the food. You don't have to go through all of that if you don't want to. Yeah. We hope this time with Kira inspires you to gather your loved ones around the table. Whether you're lighting a few candles and ordering pizza or cooking a meal from scratch, gathering is made special by the love behind it and the people who are there. The art of hosting is not about perfection. It's about creating a place where people feel welcomed, loved, and known. We hope you felt that same warmth and welcome in today's episode of The Art of Hosting. If you enjoyed it, we'd be grateful if you'd like this video and subscribe to our channel. And we can't wait to meet you around the table in our next episode.