Out & About
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Banquets are back: the Old World kind, with long tables, clusters of grapes, and exotic flowers draped on rich fabrics. Some describe the experience as medieval, others imagine they are living like kings, queens, and dukes. And indeed, some actually are.
Tuesday night, the Frick Collection honored the Duke of Devonshire and his family for their work to preserve and maintain their estate, Chatsworth, a most impressive national historic treasure.
The duke gave remarks in the rear of the West Gallery, which for the first time since 1935 was set for dinner service. Two tables spanned the length of the room, each one seating more than 100 guests.
“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for making me feel at home by having dinner in a room which is really so much like a breakfast room for us at home,” the duke said.
Everybody laughed, but the duke had captured the mood perfectly: The decor and the seating arrangement felt extraordinary.
To be precise, there were 47 people seated on each side of the tables, with couples sitting at the ends. The heads of the table on the left were Howard and Mary Phipps (who dined with Fernanda Kellogg, Robert Wood Johnson, and Andrew Sidamon-Eristoff at their end) and Stephen and Christine Schwarzman (who dined with Arie and Coco Kopelman, Sid and Mercedes Bass, Charlotte Moss and Barry Friedman, Patricia Altschul, and Andre Leon Talley).
The people who mattered most at the other table were in the center: namely, the duke himself (without the accompaniment of his wife, Amanda), the director of the Frick, Anne Poulet, and the retiring chairwoman of the Frick, Helen Clay Chace.
For the record, the duke was joking about the size of his breakfast room. Chatsworth doesn’t even have one, and the dining room is about a quarter of the size of the West Gallery, he said. Back in the English countryside, the duke is more concerned with replacing 17th-century staircases and making other improvements that will help the more than 500,000 annual visitors to the estate appreciate its history.
New Yorkers, meanwhile, are taking on grand entertainments. The Frick’s banquet was in some way natural to the space, which used to be, after all, a private mansion. But other spaces suffice.
The Prospect Park Alliance gala on Friday, for example, took place at the Brooklyn Museum. There, the Beaux-Arts Court was transformed into a banquet hall, with thematically appropriate European masters lining the room.
“It reminds me of the great halls of Europe where you dined with the king. Or the dining rooms of Oxford,” an art adviser, Maria Friedrich, said.
It may sound unbearably stuffy, but in fact, New Yorkers find it democratic. Whereas round tables can at most sit 10 people, rectangular tables can accommodate a great many more.
The trend began last month at the Brooklyn Historical Society gala, where the arrangement felt more like a picnic than a formal banquet.
“It brings everyone down to the same level. It creates a great sense of community,” Ms. Friedrich said.
It’s that sense of community that motivates and inspires New Yorkers to support great causes in the first place. So it comes as no surprise that the amount raised broke records. The Prospect Park Alliance event, with more than 700 guests, took in $550,000. The Frick Collection event, with 290 guests, took in $500,000.
