“Eat” and “eat” are hardly synonymous verbs. Consumption – absorbing calories, satisfying hunger – is of a pragmatic nature. However, food satisfies another, more poetic genre of appetite. It’s about taste, pace, conversation. “When I think of a dinner party, I think of storytelling, theater and drama,” she says DevonFrancisthe chef and artist behind the New York food and events production company yardy world. “How do all these different elements of a meal come together as a set piece? How will the layout make you engage with it? EAT it? Will you discuss it afterwards?”
Francis and his team are what you might call dinner party impresarios. Their Afro-Caribbean menus—with dishes like spicy snapper escovitch with carrots and Scotch bonnet aioli, or street-cart-inspired watermelon salad topped with Francis’ personal version of tajín—fuel equally memorable events: boisterous dimes-square feasts with coveted ones Tickets or roller discos in the gyms at Bed Stuy School, where people dance to the likes of SZA and Tara-Jo Tashna, with squid aioli still caked on their fingertips — alongside private events for brands like Gucci and Squarespace.
Francis and his team take care of everything from invitations and themes to menus and music. “They want everything to be sensual: orange and lemon peel and cinnamon maybe perfume the air. Maybe you have all those farmer’s market dahlias exploding out of a vase next to a three-tiered cake with a big and eye-catching frosting design,” he explains. “You want people to feel completely immersed.”
Raised in Norfolk, Virginia to two Jamaican immigrants, Francis was introduced to Caribbean-American cuisine at his father’s local jerk chicken restaurant. When he moved to New York at 19 to study art at Cooper Union in Manhattan, he immersed himself in a new culinary space, working in kitchens and serving tables at trendy downtown restaurants like Estela and Altro Paradiso. “While juggling school and restaurant work, I became really interested in art and food as forms of storytelling. And at the time I was also thinking a lot about my story and that of my parents and how I could use something like a dining table to tell those stories. That’s how Yardy World came about,” he says.
Besides filming cooking tutorials in Good Appetite‘s test kitchen and cooking in pop-ups that have taken place at venues like Winona’s, The Fly and Pioneer Works, Francis launched a new leg of Yardy World last November: an e-commerce store selling seasonal recipe cards for dishes like oxtail -Apple sells cakes and cornmeal funnel cakes; chic linen napkins; and a Caribbean-inspired snack mix with nuts, spices, plantain chips, and dried fruit. Earlier this month, I spoke to Francis over Zoom about storytelling, tabletop curation, and the secrets of throwing a dinner party that lasts forever.
What is the most important element of a great dinner party?
For me, immersion is what separates a dinner party from dining at a restaurant. The whole idea is you’re in my house, you’re entering my space, those are my rules. At one dinner, we encouraged people not to use cutlery because using your hands, touching the food, is such a tactile, intimate way of approaching the food. In this way, I want every dinner party I throw to offer people different ways of perceiving and experiencing things. And that’s the great thing about food: when you immerse people, they feel and taste deeper. You will be transported.
How do you decide on the concepts behind each of your events?
When I start planning a party, I always tap into friends, artists, and community members who can help me bring a really exciting mix of people and ideas into the room – people who can help me rethink, how we see food and how we can build striking visual landscapes. Sometimes we build a meal around an album that’s just been released, or a runway collection, or an artwork; sometimes about history and heritage. I once threw a party where we covered the table with these beautiful silkscreened newspapers with photos of my mom, and each dish was inspired by a different member of my family: a riff on my dad’s favorite cabbage dish, a fish wrapped in banana leaf that reminded me my first trip to Jamaica with my grandparents as a kid.
How does your background as an artist influence your dinner parties?
Art has always been a very important way of storytelling for me – so when I’m preparing a dish or my team and I are taking stock of the season, we strive for something that’s technically delicious but feels experience even. We ask ourselves how do we get the most out of an ingredient? How do we use a dish to present the story of an ingredient that people have used for centuries so that we honor its tradition but also place it in a contemporary context? How can we reinvent what this ingredient can do or how it shows up on a plate? I used to eat cooked chayote squash in soup as a kid, so at an event a while ago we also had chayote squash — but in a savory pie with caramelized onions and culantro.”
At the same time, the presentation is just as important from a design point of view. How do we present a dish? Is it served cocktail style? Is it folded into dough? Do people have to pick it up with their hands? is it on a plate And when all of those storytelling elements come together, it creates something that feels as much like an art installation as a meal.
“When you’re able to immerse people, they feel and taste things more deeply.”
What inspired the launch of Yardy World’s newer online store?
Work at Good Appetite gave me a whole new way of thinking about food. Good food should be something we all have access to, and in the test kitchen I focused on taking some of the intimidation out of cooking; Teaching basic cooking skills. And that’s the philosophy behind Yardy World’s snacks and tableware: accessibility. All of our products make the flavors I grew up with readily available in people’s homes. This is important to me as not everyone can come to our dinners in New York and we don’t always have the luxury of traveling to meet people where they are.
How does your restaurant work experience influence your pop-ups?
I miss working in the kitchen a lot. I mean, when I was in college, working in upscale restaurants in lower Manhattan was an incredible opportunity. I’ve met so many great people. Waiting felt like my personal version of getting the nightly news. I really understood what people were interested in, what excited them or what they were afraid of. I need to see relationships thrive or fall apart right in front of me. I think I’ve always been deeply moved by this concept – and a huge inspiration for Yardy World. At my events, I often respond to what people want – or must– from a culinary experience, be it to feel nourished or entertained.
Thinking about my favorite restaurants now, they’re still places I feel inspired to learn from the way staff curate an experience. But unlike restaurants, Yardy World events are once-in-a-lifetime experiences. You can’t keep coming back to the same space – so we need to build another ecosystem that’s just as powerful, even if it only takes a few hours.