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A Year of Hosting with Rinkit: What I Ordered, and What I Thought

Rather than review Rinkit as an abstraction, I’m going to take you through the actual occasions where I relied on it most heavily — because I think this paints a more genuinely useful picture of what it’s like to make Rinkit part of your hosting life.

The Christmas Dinner for 22: Serving Dishes, Platters & the First Test

My first Rinkit order was born of Christmas emergency rather than considered research, and this turned out to be the best possible way to discover the site. Under pressure, you learn the truth about things quickly. I needed large serving platters (at least four), a set of matching serving bowls for vegetables and roasted potatoes, and a stack of side plates to supplement the modest set I already owned. The total for this order came to just under £60 — for quantities and quality that would have cost well over £150 at a John Lewis or a Marks & Spencer homeware section.

The platters arrived two days after ordering. They were a plain white with a subtle relief texture around the rim — the kind of understated design that disappears into the table and lets the food do the talking, which is exactly what you want. The ceramic was solid and appropriately heavy without being impractical. I stacked a whole roasted goose on the largest platter and it held it entirely without flexing. Over the course of the Christmas meal, with twenty-two people passing, reaching, and helping themselves, not a single piece chipped or showed any sign of complaint. One of my guests — who has extremely well-developed opinions about tableware — asked where the platters were from. When I told her, she said: “Really? I genuinely wouldn’t have guessed.”

The Summer Garden Brunch: Outdoor Tableware That Actually Looks the Part

The British summer is an exercise in optimism, and so is outdoor entertaining. You set up a beautiful table, pin your hopes on a favourable Met Office forecast, and then adapt when the clouds arrive. For my July garden brunch — eight friends, a long table on the patio, a menu that involved a lot of eggs, sourdough, and prosecco — I wanted outdoor-safe tableware that didn’t look like it came from a camping supply store.

Rinkit’s melamine range was the answer, and it was an excellent one. I ordered a set of eight melamine dinner plates in a matte stone finish — the kind of warm grey-beige that photographs beautifully and works with literally any food styling. Up close, in direct sunlight, you can tell they’re not ceramic if you look carefully enough. From any normal conversational distance, you cannot. The acrylic prosecco flutes I ordered alongside them had a clarity and shape that was genuinely surprising for outdoor-use glassware, and the whole table looked put-together and deliberately styled rather than rustically improvised. Several guests photographed their plates before eating, which I take as a meaningful data point.

The Charity Fundraiser Dinner: 40 People, Catering Quantities, Professional Quality

When I was asked to help organise a charity fundraiser dinner for forty people — three courses, seated — one of my first jobs was to source enough matching plates and serving equipment for the whole evening. Professional catering hire was quoted at a price that would have consumed a significant fraction of the proceeds. Rinkit was the alternative, and it performed outstandingly.

We ordered forty dinner plates, forty side plates, forty dessert bowls, and a collection of large serving bowls and ladles for the buffet-style starter. The total cost was a fraction of the hire quote, and the plates were ours to keep (which, for an organisation that runs events regularly, represented an ongoing asset rather than a sunk cost). The quality withstood an evening of catering-level handling — multiple trips through a commercial dishwasher, being stacked and restacked by volunteers, and the general controlled chaos of a large catered event. Every single piece came through without incident.

Kitchen & Pantry Storage: The Quietly Life-Changing Category

I want to make a case for something that doesn’t feature in enough Rinkit conversations: their kitchen and pantry storage range. It is deeply unglamorous — no one photographs their spice rack for social media — and yet it has had, genuinely, more day-to-day positive impact on my domestic life than any of the entertaining pieces I’ve bought.

I ordered a full set of glass storage jars in three sizes for my pantry, a set of stackable food containers for the fridge, and a bamboo-topped bread box that is both functional and the most attractive thing I’ve ever put on my kitchen worktop. The glass jars have transformed my pantry from a place I avoided looking at into something that resembles a photograph from an interiors magazine. The seals on both the jars and the food containers are genuinely airtight — contents stay fresh, nothing absorbs fridge odours, and the lids haven’t warped or lost their seal in the four months since I ordered them. The bread box has kept a loaf of sourdough fresh for four days, which, given the usual two-day lifespan of sourdough in my kitchen, felt like a minor domestic miracle.

This is the category I recommend most enthusiastically to friends who are sceptical about Rinkit, because the daily return on investment is so immediately obvious. You see the glass jars every morning. You reach for the airtight containers several times a day. The value compounds in a way that occasional tableware simply doesn’t.

Is Rinkit Worth It for Entertaining? The Honest Comparison

As someone who has spent money at Marks & Spencer Home, TK Maxx, B&Q, and the big department stores over the years, I can give you a genuinely experiential comparison rather than a theoretical one. Against M&S Home, Rinkit is significantly cheaper on almost all comparable tableware — and in the serving platter and large-format ceramic category, the quality is equivalent enough that I’d challenge anyone to tell them apart at a dinner table. Against TK Maxx, Rinkit wins on consistency: TK Maxx is a treasure hunt that requires physical presence and significant luck. Rinkit lets you find exactly what you need, in the right quantity, reliably, from your sofa.

The comparison I find most useful, though, is against the habit of buying cheap and replacing often. Before I discovered Rinkit, I had accumulated, over years, an array of individually cheap items that collectively represented poor value — plates that chipped at the rim after a few months, storage containers that lost their seal, glasses that fogged in the dishwasher. The Rinkit pieces I’ve been using regularly for two years have shown none of these symptoms. The slightly higher initial cost (relative to the very cheapest alternatives) has not needed to be repeated, which is where the real value calculation resolves firmly in Rinkit’s favour.

The Entertainer’s Scorecard

Is Rinkit Right for You?

The Rinkit Entertainer’s Shopping Guide: What to Order for Every Occasion

The Final Word

Good hosting is built on good foundations — reliable tableware, functional kitchen organisation, the confidence that your table will look as good as you imagine when you planned the evening. Rinkit provides all of those foundations without demanding that you choose between a beautiful table and a healthy budget. That, in a cost-of-living era where entertaining has become an increasingly considered decision rather than a reflexive one, is not merely useful. It is genuinely important.

Two years and more gatherings than I can easily count after that first Christmas emergency order, Rinkit.com is not a site I remember in moments of need. It is one I think of first, when I’m planning something wonderful.

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Disclosure: This article may contain affiliate links. If you make a purchase through these links, we may earn a commission at no additional cost to you. All opinions and experiences are entirely our own, based on genuine personal use over an extended period.