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The dinner parties started years ago in an unfinished loft in industrial Brooklyn: chickens cooked in a balky oven and served on a banged-up old table someone found on the street. My wife and I were unmarried then, childless, but already, it seemed, in the process of building a sort of home, the sort we wanted to live in, where there’s always something happening in the kitchen, always a lot of people bustling about and always an extra seat for whoever’s around: friends from college, from work, from the bar. We’d put the call out on a weekend morning: You free for dinner? Then make a salad to go with the meat, roast some potatoes with onions and rosemary, slide a few baguettes onto the table, serve a lot of wine. We did this often enough that the eating became not just simple sustenance but instead a kind of rolling weekly party of six people, eight, 10, informal and slightly disorganized, our room filled with conversation and good cheer. Eventually the calls started coming in rather than going out: You cooking tonight?

Later we cooked in an airy apartment a few miles north, next to a candle factory that filled the air with strange vanilla scents: big feeds of shredded pork or brisket and heaps of steamed greens, as babies slept in their car seats next to their parents’ chairs. We were a family by then, in fact as much as spirit. We moved the babies east, to a tiny old house on the end of Long Island where we would put a dozen or more people around a table for eight to eat epic meals of clams and corn, ribs and rice. Arms got tangled as people who sometimes hardly knew one another reached for the food. Someone put a name to that, to the way you’d have to snake your arm under someone else’s just to get to the butter, the salad, a bottle, the salt: the boardinghouse reach.

Table Talk

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We took the boardinghouse reach to dinners in Connecticut after that, where we simmered chili and cooked fragrant roast lamb and served it outside on a picnic table under towering oaks after picking up friends at the train. We took it to Maine, where we cooked on a wood stove and ate over a plywood table lighted with kerosene lamps: cod cakes, slaw, chicken paprikash. We reached across tables on sticky urban roofs under the night sky, in suburban yards under string lights, in rooms that were small and dingy, large and luxurious. We cooked for family real and imagined, usually casually, occasionally formally, ideally somewhere between the two. The point was just to cook — or, more accurate, the point was just to get people to gather around a table and eat, and to do so regularly enough that they knew that it would happen again soon.

Is that a proper dinner party, to eat that way? It is when the company’s good and you can have ice-cream sandwiches for dessert. There won’t be coasters for the cocktails, and you’ll need to hold on to your fork between courses — if indeed there are courses. Coats will be piled on a bed or draped over a banister in the hall. You may need to sit on a stool or a box. But there will always be candles set out and hot dogs in the back of the fridge if someone’s kid doesn’t like the mushrooms in the lasagna or the oxtails in the stew. A dinner party to me is just dinner, served to a crowd that can ebb or flood depending on the season or the weather, on whether a call went out or a work schedule changed.

This sort of entertaining requires flexibility in planning. When all are welcome, people bring other people. So you will want to ask your guests to bring beverages and flowers and other markers of good cheer. Asking helps underscore the message of the night: We’re all in this together. (I always ask for dessert.) To that end as well, don’t cook food that’s portioned as single servings — go with things that can easily be spread across more portions than you’d planned, in case someone brings a new girlfriend, some kid’s friends, somebody’s mom or dad. I like tacos for that, huge salads, lots of potatoes.

Table Talk

To ensure a guest’s story becomes truly interesting, just ask two questions over and over: what and why. What exactly happened? What did that feel like? Seek emotional specifics. And then: Why? Why is this anecdote important? This is where the guest’s most thoughtful connection to a story lies.

For much the same reason, a dinner party of the sort I enjoy demands a casual approach to setting the table and to setting a time when you’re actually going to eat. You want to edge into the evenings slowly, engaging in a kind of hospitality that encourages repose rather than nervousness that you’re not going to know which fork to use when you eventually sit down. That takes a kind of confidence, the sort you gain only by practice. It requires that you act as a host. Make sure there is music playing, though not so loudly that you can’t hear people talk. Then, as people arrive, make sure they get a glass of wine or a beer or a rather larger cocktail than they’d make for themselves. Introduce the outgoing ones to people they don’t know; lead the shy to their friends or put them to work in the kitchen, peeling vegetables or stirring a pot. And soon enough it happens, right in front of you: Conversation burbles, runs to fishing and novels, to politics and farming, nearly always to real estate, always to laughs. I watch the energy build. It always builds.

And then, when there’s a good, convivial buzz in the air, I call everyone to attention and serve shellfish in the kitchen or out in the yard, steamed clams or shucked oysters or peel-your-own shrimp, meant to be consumed standing up, as if we were animals at a trough, though the sort of animals who drink prosecco with their feed. I do that because it’s delicious and different (we’re not sitting down?) and special, but also because I believe it acts as a kind of dinner bell in the universe, a dog whistle heard by only my knucklehead friends who said they’d be coming at 6 but then got caught up in replacing a water filter on the boat until well after 7.

Dinner at last! The candles are flickering, and everyone’s ready to eat, and you may find yourself nervous that you haven’t made enough food, particularly because you’ve seen the damage that the big fellow who came with Jim’s sister put on the clams. Never worry. Put everything out as a buffet, or arrange platters family-style at the table, and let your guests have at the feast. The modern parable of the loaves and fishes does not require a miracle, merely adherence to a social contract that makes everyone responsible for ensuring there’s enough food for all. I have served these meals for more than 20 years. There is almost always enough food for all. Indeed, and particularly for those just starting out, there are usually leftovers. The best dinner parties offer memories that last a long time, and a few extra meals besides.

Sam Sifton is an Eat columnist for the magazine, the food editor of The Times and the founding editor of NYT Cooking, its digital recipe archive.

Photographs by Peden & Munk for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Amy Wilson.