No one does dinner like the royals.
On Friday, King Charles III and Queen Camilla welcomed a who’s who of celebrity guests to their Highgrove House estate in Tetbury, England.
The event was aimed at celebrating the value of slow food and slow fashion − alternatives to the fast-paced production methods more common in today’s highly globalized society. Slow food and fashion lean into local components and less alienation from the labor that creates the product.
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“Good food brings people together and what we choose to eat helps to define us – as families, communities and nations,” the king said at the dinner, BBC reports.
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The menu, which trafficked heavily in Italian fare, was meant to be a palette warmer for the royal couple’s upcoming state visit to Italy and the Vatican. Guests included Victoria and David Beckham, oft-royal guests, and actress Helen Mirren.
Mirren was invested as a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2003, an honor bestowed by the late Queen Elizabeth II.
Stanley Tucci, a newly minted cookbook author, was also in attendance. Tucci’s wife Felicity Blunt (sister to Emily) is British-born while Tucci is Italian-American.
Tucci is fresh off a role in “Conclave,” an Oscar-nominated film that dramatizes the selection of a new pope and, with fresh rigor, examines an institution mired in mystery. His connections to Italy took center stage in “Searching for Italy,” a two-season reality cooking show on CNN that saw Tucci travel across the country to sample regional cuisines.
Italy’s ambassador to the U.K. Inigo Lambertini also attended.
“To say that we are looking forward to it would be to engage in a little British understatement,” the king said of his upcoming travel to Italy, according to the BBC. The trip will coincide with his and Camilla’s 20th wedding anniversary.
The two married in 2005, following a highly-publicized cheating scandal that wracked the royals and forever tarnished both parties’ reputations in the eyes of some royal watchers. Charles was first married to the late Princess Diana, whose popularity among both the British and American public made her both a style icon and folk hero.
