‘Tis the season for gathering, so to make sure your dinner party goes as planned, we’ve asked some of our favourite hospitality names for their top tips to save you from disaster.

In The Menu, a new black comedy from Searchlight Pictures releasing this Thursday, a couple (Anya Taylor-Joy and Nicholas Hoult) travels to an exclusive destination restaurant on a remote island. There, an acclaimed chef (Ralph Fiennes) has prepared an ornate tasting menu, along with some shocking surprises. To celebrate the release of the film, we asked four local hospitality masters how to create the perfect dinner party – albeit ideally one that’s hopefully a bit less eventful – and what to do if things turn upside down.

Diva Giles (Ngāti Whātua), co-owner of Beau, on the best drink to greet your dinner party guests with

I always get a bit anxious when people are arriving if I’m hosting – even though I do that every night for a living. So, it has to be bubbles. It has fun party vibes, but you don’t actually have to do any work for it. You just pour it into someone’s glass and they feel all sparkly and fun off the bat. For me, I always go with a nice dry prosecco like one we have at Beau which is one of my absolute favourites: Nino Franco. It’s delicious – the best prosecco I’ve ever tasted.

But what if a bottle you open during the course of the night is tainted?

If it’s tainted, it’s likely to be aged. So if you’ve cellared it yourself, just freak out a little bit inside, put a smile on your face and grab another bottle. Keep the giggles going and have your best hospo face on, it’s all good. You can keep it aside, because if it’s only a little bit off it’s good for something silly like sangria – or you can make pasta with it later, depending on how tainted it is.

When something bad happens, and you start freaking out, you have to keep calm, laugh it off, give someone else an instruction to be like, “go fill everyone’s glass, I’m freaking out and I need a minute”. Dealing with this stuff is kind of what hosting is. And when things go wrong, it’s just creating stories and content for your life. I like to think that one day, I will be old, drinking champagne, telling stories of terrible mistakes I made while hosting dinner parties.

This content was created in partnership with Searchlight Pictures. The Menu is in cinemas Thursday 24 November – find tickets here.

Ophelia Harradine Bayly, co-owner of Roses, on how to create an otherworldly atmosphere at the dining table

People always say, “if the food’s good, nothing else matters”. I just don’t think that at all. The food has to be good, but for us, a good dinner party is not one thing, it’s everything working in unison. A huge part of that is ambiance and vibe. If I go somewhere and the food is good and the vibe is off all I think is “yeah the food is good but the vibe is off”. To me, that means low lighting and it also means candle light, real candles. A true dinner party means wax dripping.

I don’t think the specifics of the vibe matter too much as long as you’ve thought about them. A good host inherently does that anyway – you do the small stuff and it contributes to an overall vibe. A little bit of a bustle and some sort of undertone of music, but you don’t want music to overpower. A perfect dinner party scene is balance: it’s this little orchestra of sensory experiences coming together in a perfect mash up. Because really everything about the dinner party is sensory, it’s what you see, it’s what you smell, it’s what you taste.

What’s your plan if you’ve run out of some essential dinner party items?

We would go around our hospitality friends on Karangahape Road and be like, “we need stuff”. There’s a million ways you can improvise that don’t have to feel perfect. If we were having a dinner party at home and realised we’d taken all of our plates to an event and accidentally left them there, maybe we’d roll a piece of paper out on the table and have a nacho party. There are so many ways that you can freestyle stuff and if you can laugh at yourself and you can laugh at the situation and be like oh I’m so sorry we don’t have any plates but hey this is still good then everyone will think that. There’s not really such a thing as failure, because something always comes out of it and there’s always another dinner party. But don’t fuck it up because then people won’t come back.

Marlar Boon, co-owner of Mabel’s, on the most delicious dinner spread

What I usually serve is a Burmese national dish, mohinga, which is a fish noodle soup, which has onions and lemons through it, and rice noodles. So if someone is dairy free or gluten free it’s the perfect option allergy wise. Then my husband and I will deep fry some mackerel that we put in it. We do a lot of curries and rice and salads as well. I always keep an amount of Burmese tea leaves called lahpet in my freezer – they’re quite hard to source. They’ll be dressed with oil that’s had garlic fried in it, citrus, fish sauce, chili and a lot of fried-off legumes. I always try to give a couple different options as well as it’s quite a strong flavour but usually everyone that comes over to our house loves it. Everything is similar to how we serve food at the restaurant. The restaurant to me is an extension to how I look after people at home.

The conversation is dwindling – what’s your fix?

I don’t know if that ever really happens at our house because we always have people sitting on the floor at the coffee table, or people at a dining table or if it’s nice weather and I’ve invited too many people, some people will be on the deck outside. And people are free to just mingle. I like the atmosphere to be a bit hectic.

We always have cards played. So that probably is the thing: get some cards out. Burmese people, we play Burmese poker a lot. I am kind of known to have a packet in my bag. I think that’s a really great way for everyone to be at the same level and you don’t even have to worry about conversation.

Robert Fairs, chef and owner of Londo, on the best dessert to sign off your meal

First of all, we prefer the term pudding – it’s just more inviting and sounds more homely and comforting. Right now, it’s springtime so there’s loads of things to forage in Christchurch. Elderflower is going crazy at the moment, there’s heaps of fruit and berries coming into the season as well. At this dinner party we’re doing a really nice little elderflower panna cotta with macerated strawberries, an elderflower cordial and a little strawberry sorbet. I would say that would be a pretty good go-to. It’s relatively easy to make and you can set it into little cups ahead. It’s a good snapshot of what’s in season.

You realise after dinner that your panna cotta hasn’t set, what do you do?

There’s so many possibilities when you have a little bit of nice puff pastry lying around. A go-to for me at a dinner party – especially with a lot of people there – is a tarte tatin because you literally just need some fruit that’s lying around in your fruit bowl, a little bit of sugar – caramelise that, a piece of puff pastry on top, chuck it in the oven, let it cook, flip it over and you’ve got an amazing dessert.

The tarte tatin is a good interactive one, you can have someone peel the apples and someone chop them. Have someone caramelising the sugar. It’s a nice easy one that everyone can pitch in on. A dinner party is all about sharing and having a bit of fun. Personally, I always have to check myself when I have a dinner party because I get real cheffy about it. But often I think it’s best to just relax and let everyone else pitch in and have some fun. It’s second nature to control everything, but I’m definitely getting better at just letting off the gas a little, enjoying the company more than worrying about the finer details.