Entertaining With shows how a party came together, with expert advice on everything from menus to music.
Growing up in Orange County, Calif., Beverly Nguyen, 34, always celebrated Lunar New Year with her family, a custom that her parents brought with them when they emigrated from Vietnam in 1984. When Nguyen moved to New York City in 2010, she in turn carried the tradition with her, sometimes inviting a few friends to her apartment for takeout and other years hosting more elaborate gatherings. This year’s party — a dinner for about 30 people at the TriBeCa events space 102 Franklin Street on the Friday night before the holiday — ended up being particularly meaningful. A week earlier, Nguyen’s paternal grandmother, Dương Thị Hoan, had died at the age of 95, and the loss, Nguyen told her guests, led her to reflect on the importance of “celebrating one another.” Hoan, who was a mother of nine, had a “natural instinct to come together that I think she passed down,” said Nguyen, whose four-year-old downtown New York store, Beverly’s, sells entertaining essentials, including tableware and cooking tools. “Food heals everybody,” she added, “and I think the best thing to do when you’re grieving and emotional is to feed people.”
Earlier that week, Nguyen had traveled to Orange County for the funeral and took the opportunity to shop for ingredients like ginger candies, herbs, sticky rice cakes and pickled daikon at the same Vietnamese grocery stores she frequented as a child. She also brushed up on her culinary skills: “One of my aunts has a restaurant, and I ended up going into the kitchen and learning to cook egg rolls in the deep fryer,” she says.
In the weeks leading up to Têt, as the Lunar New Year is called in Vietnamese, Nguyen also prepared by partaking in some traditional rituals. She cleaned her apartment from top to bottom in order to “absorb fresh energy” into her home, she said, and made a point of avoiding any big life or business changes, like taking on new clients or signing contracts. (The period before Têt is considered an inauspicious time to do so.) She also set up an altar in her apartment to honor her ancestors, arranging family photographs, oranges, bottles of alcohol and incense around a cherry blossom centerpiece. The night before the holiday, she always makes sure to take out the trash, wash her hair and arrive home by midnight — all on the advice of her mother. “If you’re out, then you’ll be out all next year,” she had warned Nguyen when she was a child. Luckily, because her party preceded the actual holiday by a few days, Nguyen and her guests didn’t have to abide by that rule.
The attendees: Nguyen wanted this year’s Têt gathering to feel intimate, and she invited people she describes as her “New York family.” Guests included the architect Louis Rambert, 38, who designed Nguyen’s store, and Naomi Otsu, 37, a graphic designer and illustrator whom Nguyen met while working at the downtown fashion boutique Opening Ceremony when she first moved to New York. Another former co-worker at the shop, Phillip Nguyen, 38, now the director of e-commerce at Calvin Klein, also joined the festivities. The creative director Akari Endo Gaut, 45, brought her 10-year-old son, Mies. Judy Wong, 65, the director of operations at the restaurants the Odeon, Cafe Luxembourg and Cafe Cluny, sat next to Joshua Glass, 34, the founder and editor in chief of Family Style magazine, for which Nguyen serves as an editor. Following the dinner, the art dealer Alex Tiwa, 36, hosted fellow guests at a small after-party at his TriBeCa apartment-cum-gallery space.
The drinks: Nguyen’s family tradition is to bring a “giant bottle of Hennessy” to a Têt party, she said, but for her event she partnered with the Scotch whisky brand Glenlivet on two cocktails: the Year of the Snake featured 12-year-old Glenlivet, pomegranate ginger syrup, lemon juice and spicy toasted sesame oil, while the Lunar Old Fashioned combined Martell Blue Swift cognac, five-spice simple syrup, plum bitters and angostura bitters. Drinks were served out of Mamo glassware, designed by Arley Marks, 40, who owns 102 Franklin Street, a loft with a large open kitchen in the back. “Beverly is beyond organized,” he said. “I’ve worked with a lot of chefs and, usually, it’s like a bomb has gone off.”
The music: Nguyen’s event did make some noise, though. Inspired by her experience performing in a Vietnamese dance troupe as a child, she invited the Wan Chi Ming Hung Gar Institute, a dance team established in New York in 1973, to do a traditional lion dance before dessert. Musicians pounded on drums while Nguyen tempted a large yellow lion, brought to life by two men hiding underneath an elaborate costume, with a head of lettuce. For the rest of the night, she put on a playlist made by her friend the makeup artist Stevie Huynh, 40, who is also a member of the Asian American and Pacific Islander queer dance collective Bubble T. The soundtrack was primarily disco and upbeat 1980s female bands like New Paradise and September.
The table: “I’m constantly trying to make my life look like a scene from ‘In the Mood for Love,’” said Nguyen, referencing the 2001 Wong Kar-wai film, which is known for its beautiful florals and mood lighting. To that end, she had Marks change the setting on his bulbs to a sultry red, a color believed to ward off evil spirits and bring good fortune in the New Year. For the floral arrangements, she enlisted her friend the creative director Kate Berry, 51, to create huge bouquets of orchids in tall vases that functioned like a canopy over the seated guests. Nguyen wanted the table setting to look like a “Vietnamese wedding banquet in the ’80s,” she said, so she stuck to a scheme of white and stainless steel, with the exception of baby pink napkins and red envelopes stuffed with lucky $2 bills, a Lunar New Year mainstay.
The food: Wearing a red Ferragamo dress and kitchen-friendly Crocs, Nguyen cooked Vietnamese classics like pork rolls, sticky rice cake with mung beans and pork and Vietnamese pork-and-vegetable spring rolls, which guests were told to wrap with fresh herbs before eating. The main courses included vegetarian glass noodles with shiitake mushrooms and bok choy (eating noodles on Têt is said to ensure a long life); steamed whole striped bass with ginger and scallions; and caramelized pork belly with boiled eggs “for fertility,” explained the publicist Cynthia Leung, 50, as she dug in. For dessert, Nguyen put candles in a taro cake from Daronghua Bakery in Chinatown to celebrate two birthdays in the crowd.
The conversation: To mark the year of the snake, the goal was to “find the snake” in the room — someone born in 1929, 1941, 1953, 1965, 1977, 1989, 2001, 2013 or 2025. Despite the wide range of ages, serpents proved elusive. “I’m a Taurus,” one guest offered, to much laughter. “Yeah, and I’m left-handed,” joked another.
An entertaining tip: “If I’m hosting a larger party, I think it’s so much more fun to have a lot of different dishes that people can try, versus just one thing,” said Nguyen, who, for the most part, only cooks Vietnamese food. “I know the way that my friends eat, and nobody’s like, ‘I want one steak by myself.’”
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