Entertaining With
A family celebrated the arrival of a special artwork at their home by inviting its maker to stay — and cooking her an oceanside dinner.
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Brooke Williams and Josh Liberson have hosted more dinner parties than they can count at their two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. Entertaining at their home on an island in Midcoast Maine, however, is a different thing, largely because it takes at least two boats and, often, an ATV to get from the mainland to the property, which sits on a bluff surrounded by sea and woods.
“There’s nothing casual about showing up here,” says Williams, 58, who’s a creative adviser, editor, artist and activist — she helped organize the National Women’s March in 2017 and is a founding member of the Resistance Revival Chorus, a politically minded collective of singers. Williams has been going to the island since 1987, when her parents and a friend of theirs purchased 15 rugged acres spanning one of its hook-shaped peninsulas, along with the ’70s-era board-and-batten cabin that sat on top of it. (They later added a bathroom with running water and built a second rectangular structure onto the original.) Liberson, 53, the founder of the growth consultancy Origami Advisory, which has worked with clients ranging from Crocs to Christie’s, visited for the first time in 2002, and on day three of that trip, he proposed. Every year since, the couple — and, starting in 2007, their daughter, Ada, 16 — have spent part of their summer on the island, walking, reading, swimming and, in the evenings, building a bonfire on the pebble beach in front of their house for making s’mores.
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T’s 2024 Summer Entertaining Issue is a guide to celebrating the season in less expected ways, featuring recipes and ideas from hosts with styles all their own.
– How a Death Doula Throws a Dinner Party: At the Baroque guesthouse she runs in Portugal, Rebecca Illing hosted old friends for a meal suffused with nostalgia.
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– An Easy, Beautiful Tomato Tart to Make All Summer Long: The chef Yann Nury updated his childhood favorite with cherry tomatoes and an olive oil crust.
This year, the couple persuaded their longtime friend the jewelry designer and artist Jill Platner, 54, to make the journey for a weekend in June. They’d previously decided they’d like to have one of her sculptures and that Maine, where the artist spent weekends as a child, would be the best setting for the work. The couple allowed Platner to surprise them with the piece, which turned out to be a series of vertically hinged copper winglike forms meant to move with the breeze. The artist opted to install it herself, hanging it from the branch of a pine tree at the head of the property’s shoreside trail, and Williams and Liberson chose to mark the occasion with an al fresco dinner.
Around 6:30, the group gathered beside a picnic table overlooking the bay and toasted with Lambrusco (or sparkling tea, in Ada’s case) before enjoying oysters that Liberson had broiled with garlic-and-tarragon butter. After that, they all went back up to the kitchen, where Liberson started doling out the next course: pan-seared lobster tail and claw on a bed of sugar snap pea and garlic scape purée, crowned with sautéed pea shoots and a sprig of dill. Two additional courses followed. Liberson appreciated having had the better part of the day to cook, and everyone felt grateful to have had so much time together. “It’s intimate here,” says Liberson. “You’re really in our life. And while big dinners can be a nice way of meeting people, this was about someone we just love.”
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