Entertaining With shows how a party came together, with expert advice on everything from menus to music.
At a dinner party on the final evening of the Year of the Dragon, the fashion designer Peter Som was a charismatic host in his amber-lit West Village apartment, teasing guests, refreshing wine glasses and finishing several dishes in his galley kitchen. Friends, several of whom had known Som for decades, were put to work upon arrival. Seth Johnson, a gardener and florist, shaved cucumbers on a mandoline. Christine Y. Kim, a curator at large at the Tate Modern, lit candles and filled water glasses. Kim, whom Som has known since college, wore a black wool dress with petal sleeves from the designer’s first collection from fall 1999. Later, Roopal Patel, the fashion director of Saks Fifth Avenue, arrived wearing a dress covered in plush black ribbons and invited Som to guess its maker. “You’re rusty,” she said with a smile after he made a few suggestions. “It’s Prada.”
Som, 54, is best known for the crisp silhouettes and precise seams of his namesake collection and his 2009 to 2012 women’s runway collections for Tommy Hilfiger. But if he’s out of practice with identifying designers, it’s because, since 2019, he’s immersed himself professionally in the culinary world. The pivot may seem surprising but, Som says, “especially during my crazy fashion career, cooking was what kept my feet on the ground — something that would always be there after a [chaotic] day.” Once he shut down his runway collection, cooking became even more central to his life, and he found that he “could be creative in another way, and have another dream doing something that I loved all along.” This month, he’ll release his first cookbook, “Family Style: Elegant Everyday Recipes Inspired by Home and Heritage,” which shares more than 100 dishes that pull from the flavors of Som’s Chinese American upbringing. The recipes are approachable, with easy international touches such as cinnamon toast with miso and brown sugar and a potsticker frittata.
On this February evening, Som had gathered close friends to celebrate the Lunar New Year and preview recipes from the cookbook. His guests aimed their iPhones over the kitchen island to capture Som confidently inverting his Dutch oven onto a plate to reveal fried rice with a cracker-crisp top. (His recipe borrows the technique from the Persian dish tahdig.) The dish elevates the Chinese American staple without too much fussiness, a hallmark of the food in Som’s book. “In the fashion world, the term ‘front of closet’ [refers to] garments that you wear all the time,” Som said. “I want these recipes to have the same idea: You’ll make them over and over.”
The attendees: In addition to Johnson, 34, Kim, 53, and Patel, 51, Som hosted Martin Teo, 49, the creative director of the Hong Kong jewelry brand Chow Tai Fook; Doris Josovitz, 45, a ceramist; Rob Wilson, 56, a designer and illustrator for brands like Todd Snyder and the Fifth Avenue Hotel; Uli Wagner, 54, an interior designer and architect; and Rafe Totengco, 56, the accessories designer and founder of Rafe New York.
The table: Som’s rectangular dining table was draped with a blue-and-white-striped Schumacher cloth. At each place setting, he arranged a white scalloped plate, chunky wine goblet and tiny glasses for water, all from Villeroy & Boch, as well as Juliska bamboo cutlery and a name card created by the Punctilious Mr. P’s Place Card Co. Som’s dining chairs are vintage, sourced from a junk shop in the Hamptons that he says has since become a SoulCycle. For the centerpiece, antique Christofle candlesticks were interspersed with glass vases filled with mossy sweet william and green and white ranunculus that Som and Johnson had selected that morning from Dutch Flower Line in Chelsea.
The food: Som prepared a few of his favorite recipes from the cookbook. For starters, he served tea eggs deviled with Kewpie mayonnaise and oyster sauce and a pile of rainbow shrimp chips interleaved with prosciutto, then dusted with a sweet, tangy spice mix. The family-style main course included golden-hued fried rice with a crispy crust; a radicchio salad with a miso maple dressing blended with anchovy paste and sesame oil; and Som’s Famous Lemon Chicken, a recipe passed down from his grandmother, who had been a pharmacist in Hong Kong. He baked chicken thighs skin-side up in a sauce of lemons, scallion, honey and soy. “It’s a little charred on the outside, but that’s what gives it [more] flavor,” Som said as he served the dish. For dessert, guests were treated to a pale pink Pavlova crowned with whipped cream, lychees and lime zest.
The drinks: Som served Pellegrino and Carneros chardonnay by Rombauer, a vineyard in Napa Valley. “It goes with a lot of things; it’s like a little black dress,” Som said of the wine. After dessert, guests lingered over a bottle of grappa, raising a toast to the Year of the Snake. “My eyelashes are burning,” said Totengco after a sip of the high-proof Italian brandy. “It’s changing my body temperature.”
The music: “Pink Pony Club,” “Femininomenon” and other songs from the singer-songwriter Chappell Roan’s exuberant ’80s-pop-inflected album, “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” played in the background while guests arrived. At dinner, Som transitioned into an eclectic, loungey playlist curated by the Hôtel Costes, in Paris’s First Arrondissement; Som learned about its mixes back when he traveled biannually to the Paris Fabric Show. His favorite, “Hôtel Costes 11,” includes “Soda Pop Confusion” by the French electro-pop group Variety Lab and “Enzo” by the Dutch dance music trio Kraak & Smaak.
The conversation: After toasting Som’s cookbook, Patel, Totengco and Kim reminisced about their decades-long friendship. They became close in their 20s in 1990s New York. (Som still lives in the same apartment he did then, though it’s bigger now, after he expanded into the apartment next door.) “He had just started his collection; we would come here and style it,” said Patel, who remembered sitting in the living room, taping the bottoms of shoes to prevent them from getting scuffed during photo shoots. Totengco recalled bolts of fabric stacked high in the kitchen. Later, Kim asked the guests who they thought might play Som in a “Julie & Julia”-style film adaptation of his life. “Jake Gyllenhaal, if I have to cast him myself,” Som said.
The recipe for Som’s “Prawn” and Prosciutto: The dish, for which Som used prosciutto from the Italian food hall Eataly, was inspired by a plate of potato chips tossed with jamón Ibérico he’d tried at the Lower East Side restaurant Ernesto’s. To recreate the snack at home, lay a few strips of prosciutto on a plate to create a sturdy base. Then pile freshly fried shrimp chips and more prosciutto in layers. Finish by dusting the mound with one teaspoon of light brown sugar, the zest of a lemon and togarashi, a Japanese chile powder, to taste.
