New Year’s Eve – here we come! My favorite part of New Year’s Eve is having a theme party. Every year, we pick a theme, design an elaborate menu around the theme, and include some type of drink and food tasting activity for everyone to enjoy. People get together. We hang out in our home. Fireworks go off and we watch them from our rooftop deck. Life is good! Here are some super awesome New Year’s Eve Party Theme Ideas For Foodies to get you in the celebration spirit.

Fun Activity: Have a Blind Taste Testing
This can be either with alcohol (which I prefer on New Year’s Eve) or with something else.

• Pick 5-7 different brands of the same type of booze or soda or sauce.
  • Whiskey Tasting Example: try Gentleman’s Jack, Pendleton, Rogue Dead Guy, Bulleit, and Jameson, Glenfiddich (you can buy mini bottles of this depending on how many people will be at your party because each person just gets a small sample)
  • Ginger Beer Tasting Example: try Fever, Bundaberg, Reed’s, Q Spectacular, Fentimans, Gosling’s
  • Bar-B-Que Sauce Tasting Example: try Bulls-Eye, Stubb’s, Sweet Baby Ray’s, Bone Suckin’, King’s Hawaiian Original
• Pour 5 little shots for each person (Serving size is a ¼ of an ounce. You can get drunk later and drink the rest of your bottle of choice! This activity is about tasting the difference)
  • If doing a food/sauce tasting, put a little bit of the food/sauce in a ramekin for the tasting. You may need a vessel like bread, fries, chicken wings, or crackers to dip the sauce into, so keep that in mind when serving the sauce/food tasting
  • Whenever you do a taste test, you should start from light to heavy, sweet to spicy, or mild to pungent, so as not to overwhelm the palate and provide the taster with a progressive experience.
• Label each shot or tasting #1 – #5 in order of what you are serving
• Hide the bottles so your guests do not know which bottle corresponds to which number
• Provide each person with a piece of paper and a pen
• Have each person taste #1 and write down what they think regarding aroma, color, flavor, taste
• Chase each taste with water to cleanse the palate
• Continue on like this with #2 – #5
• After all 5 tastings, review your answers with one another and show them which drink/sauce they liked the best and least
• Many times, people are very surprised at their results.

New Year’s Eve Theme Party Ideas for Foodies:

• Under The Sea – every recipe includes a seafood component like shrimp cocktail and fresh oysters for appetizers, crab salad, teriyaki glazed salmon
• Hawaiian Luau – the name says it all including musubi, Kalua pork, rice, cabbage salad, Hawaiian Lau Lau, hapia
• Stuffed – all the recipes have been “stuffed” like stuffed mushrooms, stuffed cabbage, stuffed cannoli’s

For more tasting theme party ideas and how to throw one, check out past posts:

• New Year’s Eve Theme Party: Backyard Bar-B-Que (this is a total hipster party theme)
• How We’re Celebrating New Year’s Eve with Mustard, Beer, & Pretzels (another hipster theme)
• Five Fabulous New Year’s Eve Party Theme Menus For Foodies

Happy New Year! Cheers!

Sarah Koszyk, MA, RDN