If you were an adult in the 80's

[Gr33ngr33ngr4ss]

What was your typical dinner party / restaurant menu?

Im thinking
Prawn cocktail / melon
Coq au vin with duchesse potatoes & peas
Pavlova?
With a glass of orange juice on the table before the starter.

Most of what I'm seeing here is 60s or 70s food.
If I hadn't packed all my cookery books away prior to moving house I'd say what I was cooking in the 80's.
Off the top of my head I remember doing pan fried duck breast with spiced plums, smoked haddock tartlets, mussels in white wine in toasted mini bread rolls, home made pasta, sweet and sour pork spare ribs, almond-coated sea trout.

Something like tomato melon and mint cocktail or a homemade pate. Coq au Riesling or chicken Maryland. Cheese. Black Forest gateau or poached pears.

Mushrooms in bread crumbs with a garlic mayo dip

That all sounds a bit like the late 70s TBH. Don't forget, the 80s was the decade of nouvelle cuisine.

We were courting in the 80s and OH's favourites were chinese or Indian. I was OK with that but really preferred the local steakhouse fir chicken and salad.

Yes agree most of those suggestions are 70s I had mange tout for the first time at a dinner party in the 80s if that's any help. But yes Nouvelle Cuisine was a big thing...well small 😉

I had that in the late 60s or early 70s.

Might have to dig out my Hamlyn New All Colour Cookbook …

I remember trying avocado for the first time in 1981, as part of a prawn cocktail and avocado starter. I didn't know what to expect and the restaurant didn't know how to serve it, so I crunched away at unripe avo wondering what all the fuss was about! Steak in red wine, chicken in white wine or prawn curry for mains, Crepe suzette and rum baba were "posh" desserts, maybe an artic roll for the less posh, followed by an Irish coffee. I have no idea why PPs are going on about orange juice. That definitely wasn't a thing where I lived.

Chicken liver pate on melba toast, fillet steak with fondant potato and spinach, no room for pud.

Lasagne
Chilli con carne
Paella

Those are the actual dinner party dishes I remember from that time, I'm sure there are more, just can't recall!

The microwave was a big thing in the 80s. People tried to cook whole meals from scratch in them.

I moved house in1987 and my new neighbours asked me and my husband to dinner.... Main was prawn curry served in a pineapple.

Definitely 70s.

80s was more lasagne, spag bol, stuff with filo pastry etc. Pudding: summer pudding, chocolate mousse, sorbets.

Fondue - the one with the pan is full of cooking oil and you cook little bits of meat at the table.

Serve with rich mushroom sauce.

or

Cheese Fondue - very rich cheese fondue with bread for dipping. Look up forfeits dependent on who accidentally drops their bread in the fondue.

Home made quiche Lorraine (I remember my Mum making this and going to get the right kind of cheese from the delicatessen)

The orange juice starter was served in Berni Inns. It was definitely a thing in the 60s and 70s.

I was teenager/ young adult, we didn't have dinner parties but going for a rare meal out would have been prawn cocktail, steak and chips and blackforest gateau

I remember as a child having the melon/ OJ starters early 80s on a rare dinner out. I wasn't here in the 70s but maybe our little town wasn't quite as quick to react to N Cuisine! Haha!

Oh My Days! I still have mine, but it was definitely 70s, not 80s. I used it extensively for my A level Home Economics in 76.

I recently revisited the tuna fish pie from that book. Still as good as I remember, though we can no longer buy tuna in a 400g tin!

That sounds more like the 70's, OP. By the 80s we had moved on to pasta-heavy stuff and then 'nouvelle cuisine'

In all honesty, I’m from very rural Wales so the meals that were top notch for us were probably twenty years behind the times. I remember giving my mum a Delia Smith cookbook and the pair of us thinking we would only be able to have such posh meals at Christmas as our local Lipton’s didn’t stock the ingredients and a trip to Asda, Llandudno was a Christmas treat!

teenager/young adult in the 80s. We had Indian , every Saturday, same as we'd eat now. Chicken madras, onion bhaji and pilou rice, or chicken tikka. Lean Cuisines during the week 😆

It's not really that different from now.

Nouveau cuisine and beaujolais

I was a newlywed in the early 1980's, so had quite a few dinner parties. Starters would be prawn cocktail, cod goujons or soup. Mains would be lasagne, steak fondue, or spit roast duck (my lovely. cooker had a rotisserie grill). Desserts included chocolate mousse, tarte tatin, or profiteroles and chocolate sauce. All homemade of course. Chocolate mousse is still a family favourite (from the dairy diary recipe book) and I do still glance at my Hamlyn cookery book when I am feeling nostalgic!