I’m pretty sure it’s a rite of passage, within seconds of meeting Gwyneth Paltrow, to mildly, inadvertently humiliate yourself. You know that moment when you first step outside, emerging from a dark theater after a number of hours inside, and your entire face recoils, overwhelmed briefly by the light? That’s similar to the sensation one feels for the first few moments spent in Gwyneth’s orbit. Gwyneth is an emblem for a specific strain of modern perfection: her smile seems to say, “I ran a half-marathon and cooked an entire macrobiotic Italian feast before you even woke up this morning.” To be in her presence is to dwell on your shortcomings and your strangest quirks and the features of your face you like the least.

After I was introduced to Gwyneth, on Wednesday night, before we would eat dinner in the same room (along with about a hundred other people), I, with obscene awkwardness, held out my hand. “I, uh, before any questions, I guess we should shake hands first, right?” I said. She smiled graciously—evidently, unsurprisingly, used to this sort of fumble—and we shook hands.

Paltrow was co-hosting a dinner, alongside longtime friend and renowned chef Mario Batali, at Batali’s new Manhattan restaurant La Sirena, as part of a collaboration between Goop—Paltrow’s lifestyle company—and Cadillac, in which the two brands are coming together in an effort to, to borrow some Goop-like verbiage, create experiences. (Attendees were given the chance to drive to the restaurant—from the Whitney, naturally—in the new Cadillac XT5.)

The dinner itself was attended by a mix of socialites, businesspeople, a whole lot of folks who looked like they could be cast as an “art dealer” on Law & Order, and then a slew of twentysomething professionals who all seemed to be two glasses of wine in before dinner had even begun. Paltrow—dressed in a white top with a large midriff cutout and black pants—was seated, as if you even need me to tell you, at the center table, at the head. (Can you imagine having Gwyneth Paltrow at a dinner table and not seating her at the head? No, it’s impossible.)

Paltrow and Batali—who seemed to have the nonchalant intimacy of friends who can go months without talking and then pick right back up again seamlessly—both spoke briefly to the room before the dinner got underway. First Batali described, in vivid detail, the meal about to be served (which included a tricolore appetizer, and a choice of halibut and beef short rib for the entrée), before ceding the stage to Paltrow. “So now that we all want to have sex with our food, based on [Batali’s] description . . .” Paltrow began, and it was possible to imagine, as the crowd all chuckled, that we were inside her palatial, pristine foyer, at her home in Los Angeles, that she was about to walk around and pour us all glasses of sparkling rosé (or watch, approvingly, as someone else did). She went on to note that she and Batali had been friends for 18 years. “He was just teasing me about every boyfriend I brought to [Batali’s restaurant] Babbo over the years. He liked Brad Pitt, if you want to know. Didn’t like Ben Affleck that much.” Batali chimed in at this point with a joke about babysitters, to which Paltrow chastised, lovingly, “Shut the fuck up.” She then told a short story about Cadillacs (her grandfather Buster was an obsessive fan) before signing off: “Thank you all for giving us your Wednesday night, and buon appetito, and enjoy!”

Paltrow is the platonic ideal of a dinner host, of course; without even being able to hear what she was saying (“That’s not what they do in Majorca,” “I’m telling you, three drops of grapefruit seed extract will make a world of difference,” would be my guesses), it was clear that those speaking to her were riveted. She holds a wine glass in the effortlessly cool manner of your older cousin at Thanksgiving dinner (“One day, I hope I’ll be able to look like that,” you think). Toward the end of the dinner, she left the room so gracefully that it took a few minutes for anyone to notice it had happened.

Earlier in the evening, when given the chance to speak to Paltrow, I explained, as if offering a confession to a priest, that I hadn’t turned on an oven in about a decade, and asked her how someone like me could approach the idea of healthy, Goop-y eating. “First of all, I feel like, there’s no pressure to cook for yourself,” she said, instantly making me feel like a cool compress had been placed on my forehead. “There’s also an idea of, like, ‘I *have *to do this.’ Some people work really hard, they’re exhausted, and they don’t want to. For me, it’s very relaxing and grounding, so I like to do it, and I have a lot of friends who like to do it, but also feel like they don’t have time.”

She told me that she just finished watching a Netflix series, Marcella, starring Anna Friel. “I love murder shows,” she gushed. “I finished The Night Manager. And then I just finished Marcella, which I binge-watched. And now I’m watching The Night Of on HBO—have you seen this?—it’s another murder show. It’s about this Pakistani kid in Queens, and he gets caught up in this murder, and it’s amazing. I love a murder show. Murder. Murder’s my thing. I don’t know why! It’s so creepy.”

For all her perfections—and, to be clear, Chris Martin should have written at least two albums solely about the sheer magnificence of her hair—there is a bit of a sense, in engaging with Paltrow, of regarding a person who is waiting to walk across the street at a crosswalk even though there are no cars coming. When you have it all, what’s the rush? She seems very much, at the same time, the cool teenager at Spence who everyone no doubt worshipped and gossiped about endlessly, the cool ingenue who smoked cigarettes and had a short haircut and went to dinners with Brad Pitt, and the cool mom who takes Apple and Moses to concerts and drops them off at Beyoncé’s. If she brings out any insecurities in us, it’s not her fault. She is the woman who you see leaving the gym, not a bead of sweat on her, as your face turns a tomato hue on the treadmill. After the two of us spoke, Paltrow was led toward the dining room. I followed, took a seat at my assigned table, and immediately tore into a piece of bread.