Neighborhood Italian Progressive Dinner

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If you follow my Instagram, you may have seen my stories about our neighborhood progressive dinner last weekend! I got a few questions about it, so I figured I’d spill the details here!

The Italian themed dinner that we did this past weekend was actually the second progressive dinner that we’ve done here. The first was in December, where we stopped at 7 houses for the 14 drinks (and appetizers) of Christmas. The huge variety of heavy and indulgent food and drinks at the holiday progressive dinner, caused us to reevaluate how this second dinner would go. Not gonna lie, by the fourth house, I was struggling to hold on.

For the Italian themed progressive dinner, the neighbors as a whole agreed that it would be best to follow the flow of an actual meal. We started with appetizers, followed by soup and salad, main course, and finally dessert. Four stops at four houses. At each of the four houses, three or four couples teamed up to provide the food and drink. I’ll break it down later on in the post, but each stop had a few food options and at least one beverage.

I’m not sure what the final count was, but we had somewhere between 26 and 30 people participate. We all met at the appetizer house at 5:30, where we drank and ate for about 40 minutes, before moving on to the next house. The hosts for the next house left 5 or 10 minutes before everyone else to get everything set up for the next stop. We scheduled about 5 minutes to walk from house to house, but I’m fairly certain it didn’t take that long.

As I’ve mentioned before, we’re a pretty tight-knit group, so with only a handful of babysitters on our street, some families also opened their homes for the kids to hang out. We had our girls as well as the boys from next door here with my favorite sitter. A home down the street had 4 families of kids hanging out there. It’s nice when the grownups and kids all get along!

What is a Progressive Dinner

As you may be able to tell from the text above, a progressive dinner (or safari supper, which is what we actually referred to this one as), is a dinner party, where the guests move between different houses to enjoy various courses of a meal. 

Our neighborhood progressive dinner had four courses, spread out between four different homes. We used a Facebook chat and event to organize what was happening where and when.

Our Italian Progressive Dinner Schedule

5:30 – Appetizer

  • Food: Charcuterie
  • Beverage: Sangria

Charcuteri foods spread across wooden table

6:15 – Soup & Salad

  • Food: Salad bar, Zuppa Toscana, Italian vegetable soup
  • Beverage: Italian Margaritas and beer

 

7:00 – Main Dish

  • Food: Baked penne with Italian sausage, Venetian shrimp risotto, and bread
  • Beverage: Negronis and red wine

7:45 – Dessert

  • Food: Lemon ricotta cake, chocolate cheesecake, and tiramisu
  • Beverage: Affogato and lemon sorbet cocktail

And.. Because we’ve had SO much fun doing these dinners, we have another one in the works for Memorial Day weekend. Since it’ll be warm by then, we’ll be able to hop from driveway to driveway, without the worry of having to actually host inside of our homes.