American Financer George A. Kessler had a passion for unusual parties. All of the wealthy guests at a “hobo dinner” were required to wear tattered clothing and eating out of cans. On another occasion his guests sat down to dinner in an airship hovering over the Atlantic. His most extravagant party, however, was held at the Savoy Hotel in London on June 30, 1905, to celebrate his birthday.

Taking Venice as his theme, Kessler flooded the courtyard of the hotel with water dyed blue to resemble the sea. Magnificent painted backdrops provided the setting, and the entire scene was illuminated by 400 Venetian lamps. His two dozen guests sat inside a huge silk lined gondola bobbing on the “canal,” surrounded by 12,000 carnations and an enormous number of roses. They are food prepared by 15 master chefs and served by waiters dressed as gondoliers.

The evening’s entertainment featured the great opera singer Enrico Caruso; he performed an aria while a baby elephant with a five-foot-high birthday cake strapped to its back was led across a gangplank to the Gondola and 100 white doves flew overhead. Unfortunately, the dye used in the water poisoned the swans that had been scheduled to swim around the gondola.

Four years later Kessler converted the garden of the Savoy into an Arctic paradise. Plaster “snow” covered the ground; huge white chrysanthemums decorated the walls, and an enormous metal nail represented the North Pole. Held to celebrate Robert Peary’s achievement in having reached the pole in 1909, the dinner was a unique affair. But still it was his gondola dinner that Kessler regarded as “the most novel little party I have given.”

Eccentrics All

One of the most macabre meals of all time was organized by the eccentric French culinary expert Grimod de la Reyniére in 1820. He staged it in the Paris mortuary, with a coffin behind the seat of each dinner and, as the centerpiece, a catafalque – the raised platform on which a body lies. Reportedly, some 300 spectators watched the feast from the mortuary gallery.

In the same year, in London, the height of fashion for dining in unusual places was established by a group of builders. They lunched 365 feet above the ground, inside a new cross and ball erected on the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Also in London, in 1843, two weeks before the statue of Horatio Nelson was to be hauled to the top of its column in Trafalgar Square, 14 men sat down to a feast of rump steak on the slab at the top, a mere 166 feet above the ground.

Equestrian Epicures: On March 28, 1903, at Louis Sherry’s elegant New York City restaurant, 36 formally attired gentlemen attended dinner as the guest of C. K. G. Billings, a wealthy businessman. The novel feature of the occasion: all were on horseback. Sod had been laid on the floor, and the horses were brought to the dining room by elevator. Feed bags were used as diner plates; rubber buckets as decanters for champagne. The reputed cost of the horseback banquet was $50,000.

Monster Meal

A number of eminent British scientists received a bizarre invitation to a dinner party in December 1853. The invitation itself – printed on a replica of the wing of a pterodactyl – was as unique as the site. The invitation read:

     Mr. B. Waterhouse Hawkins solicits the honor

            of Professor————‘s company at dinner,

                                in the Iguanodon,

            on the 31st of December, 1853, at 4 P.M.

The iguanodon was one of 29 life-size plaster covered brick-and-iron models of prehistoric creatures designed by animal sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins. They were to be displayed at the Crystal Palace, the gigantic glass building that had housed the Great Exhibition in 1851.

The 22 distinguished guests who attended the dinner on New Year’s Eve found themselves seated inside the creature’s body. There they were served a sumptuous meal by a team of waiters who had to clamber to the dining table after crossing a platform supported by scaffolding.

Following the superb banquet, according to the Illustrated London News, the party returned to London by train, “well pleased with the modern hospitality of the iguanodon, whose ancient sides there is no reason to suppose had ever before been shaken with philosophic mirth.”