The best takeaway and wine pairings for the ultimate NYE cosy night in

Ditch the crowds and cosy up with a good bottle and your favourite feast instead

I like going out. You know what, take that back: I love going out. I love going to restaurants, I love going to pubs, and bars. I love nightclubs, and dancing stickily until it’s light. I love house parties, roaming room-to-room, talking, and snacking, and drinking, and kissing. I love a dinner that ends in the small hours at a basement karaoke bar. I love a big ol’ night on the town. It is for this reason then, that on New Year’s Eve, I stay in.

Because some people hate going out; they loathe it. They don’t like busy restaurants or sweating in a crowd. They don’t like hubbub or the open end to the question, “where next?”. Going out is just not for them. But there’s one night a year when it is—one night when going out is for everyone, when the culture says, “Come on! Have a wild one! And do it in a sparkly dress!”

Restaurants are overbooked, the pubs are all heaving, that club night you used to go to was sold out months before you even knew it was happening. The city is in a state of pandemonium, as is every town, village, and hamlet across these British Isles. Ubers, if you can get them, cost a tenner a minute. The floors of the all-night tubes are slick with vomit, as is the pavement, and the taxi you just remortgaged your house for. You arrive at the next party shivering with cold, in unanimous agreement that it’s less fun than the last, but you can’t go back, you must go forward. You order another Uber, now twenty pounds a minute, to a pub that’s at capacity, next to a club you can’t get into, only to end up at the even-worse-than-the-last-two party, and it’s four am, and you’re drunk, and tired, and suddenly you wish you were home. Actually, you wish you’d been at home the whole time.

The thing is, you can be.

New Year’s Eve really is the perfect night in. Whilst the rest of the country is getting jostled, whilst their clothes are snagged and stained, you can be safe, and clean, and warm, and comfortable. You don’t even have to make great efforts—no elaborate dinner party or romantic meal for two is required. This year, for instance, I will be in front of a fire, facing the sea on the Cornish coast, ringing in the new year with a pasty, my partner, and a few friends. We’ll open some nice bottles of wine and the whole thing will cost less than that last Uber you ordered to, finally, take you home.

A festive table by Luke Edward Hall and Duncan Campbell

Mark Fox

New Years’ In-spiration

Drink: Chablis
Pair it with: Fish and chips

When I was a child, my mother used to host an annual New Year’s dinner party. I loved it: I loved how grown-up I felt sipping the Champagne my dad would pour into one of his grandmother’s tiny sherry glasses, I loved how our long kitchen table looked in flickering candlelight, and the fish fingers and peas I had for tea before everyone arrived. I loved falling asleep to the sound of the adults downstairs, laughing, and chatting, and scraping the last of the pie off their plates.

My mother, like much of the world’s population, believed that eating fish to ring in the new year was good luck, as do I. My ideal is a haddock and chips from The Tudor Chippy in Marazion, served with frozen peas I’ve cooked in butter, and a bottle of one of Eleni and Eduard Vocoret’s Chablis.

Drink: A big bottle of beer
Pair it with: Your favourite curry

If I were going to be in London this new year (North West, specifically), I would be ordering a dinner from Vijay’s, the curry house on Willesden Lane that has been open since 1964 and claims to be England’s oldest Southern Indian restaurant. I find Vijay’s rattan walls and charming service incredibly hard to resist, but it’s New Year’s Eve so I will make an exception. Furthermore, it means I can drink what I want—which is one of those big bottles of Burning Sky’s Assemblage No. 5. I love sharing a bottle with someone, and that because beer gets you half as drunk as wine, you can drink more of it. Burning Sky’s beers are delicious and beautifully made, but not so wild and crafty that the cold pint of lager lovers won’t like them, too.

Drink: Old Claret
Pair it with: Burgers

Okay, so my version isn’t actually a burger, it’s a large steak pasty, but statistically speaking, it’s unlikely you will be in the west country on New Year’s Eve, which means it’s unlikely you’ll have a Gear Farm Pasty warming away in your oven as you open, say, a 1998 bottle of Château Angludet. But there’s a glut of good burgers in the UK at the moment, and the fatty, bready, juiciness will pair perfectly with a 20-ish-year-old Claret.

Claret is not currently en vogue (like Burgundy), and they make a lot of it. You can buy good Claret, and old Claret, for not very much money. Wines these days are being drunk younger and younger, so bottle age feels even more special.

Drink: Champagne
Pair it with: New Year’s Eve in general, or chicken, or both

What I want here is very specific. It’s a bottle of Ulysse Collin Les Maillons with Nigella’s Chicken and Orzo. The champagne is prohibitively expensive, and chicken and orzo is decidedly not a takeaway, but I’m sorry—that is what I want. It doesn’t mean you have to want it, too; possible alternatives include: Pol Roger and a Boneless Bucket, or perhaps Champagne Charpantier and Chicken Chow-Mein. The world’s your oyster! You could, of course, pair your Champagne with actual oysters, which, of course, would be completely delicious.