When it comes to hosting, who better to take advice from than Martha Stewart? The lifestyle guru, who has penned 100 cookbooks to date, isn’t afraid to tell it how it is. Whether it’s shading a host’s choice of decor (or lack thereof) or sharing her top hosting dos and don’ts (do invite guests into the kitchen, but don’t forget to organize it ahead of time), fans can always count on Stewart’s unfiltered opinion. And this was no more evident than in her appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show, during which she spilled her secret method for getting guests to leave.
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Despite being the host of your own dinner party, some things are unfortunately out of your control—for instance, your guests’ tardiness or if they bring an uninvited plus one. In the latter's case, Stewart said the solution is quite easy.
“Make another seat! What are you going to do, say, ‘You have to go home?’ Be practical…You can get irritated, but not visibly,” she said on the daytime talk show.
As for getting guests to leave, now that’s another conundrum. If you recently hosted Thanksgiving, you might have run into this problem. After a long day of cooking and socializing, sometimes the host just wants to hang up their apron and prop their feet up—alone. But how do you politely kick everyone out? Well, according to the Martha Cooks star, you dismiss yourself first.
“Frankly, I just say, ‘I’m going to bed. I’ll see you,’” admitted Stewart. “I do, I just say that.”
Naturally, your guests, especially close friends and family, may assume that you’re joking at first. If that happens, “just turn the lights off,” instructed Stewart. And if they still aren’t catching on, you can always “set off the fire alarm,” she quipped.
The world-famous entertainer shared that she’s used the fire alarm trick before to help shoo guests out of her house. “One night I had the fire department show up. Nobody would leave, we just put the fire alarm on,” she recalled, causing the audience to erupt in laughter.
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However, that’s not exactly how the story goes. Stewart said the activated fire alarm was actually due to a furnace mishap, it just so happened to occur at the perfect moment.
“We did have a malfunction in the furnace and the whole fire department showed up, and the fire chief came in. He told everybody [to] get outside,” she continued. “It was like zero outside and he made everybody go outside without their coats.”
She quickly added, “That’s one way to get rid of them!” to which Drew Barrymore responded, “I like that tactic.”
