We Need More Food at Raves

A conversation with party chef extraordinaire Stasia de Tilly.

23 Oct

Welcome to 𝐃𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐭 𝐀𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐃𝐚𝐫𝐤, a special edition of The Nightlife Review created with Cake Zine, a literary food magazine exploring society through sweets in print (and occasionally online). Contributors include Vrinda Jagota, Arielle Gordon, Katie Way, Puloma Ghosh and more. All artwork is by Carlos Sanchez.

Katie Way talks to Stasia de Tilly about serving bread pudding at the club.

I encountered Stasia de Tilly’s work for the first time at a tiny IYKYK club in Maspeth, Queens in August 2023: a cardboard tray of bread pudding. It was the first time I can remember seeing food for sale there, and I was tickled. A dessert novelty, well past midnight? Why not! I plunked down $5 and was instantly charmed—the pudding threaded the needle between sweet but not too sweet, soft yet substantial. It was warmly spiced with cardamom, soaked in dulce de leche, and topped with pecans. All in all, it made for shockingly perfect party fuel, and—maybe most importantly—a complete and total stunt on the smoky back patio and the fake foggy dance floor. I posted a flash photo of it on my Instagram story, with my signature clever caption work: “bread pudding at the club.”

De Tilly serves bread pudding and savory delights like noodles, skewers, and tacos under the moniker of Kowloon Baby at parties across the boroughs—and even across state lines. Almost a year later, I was treated to their cuisine at Dripping, an emerging electronic music festival in New Jersey, held for the second time this past June. De Tilly worked as vendor providing protein-packed rice bowls, a ginger-scallion banh mi, and a chickpea tuna salad sandwich alongside chefs like Lj Almendras, CJ Harper, and the Taqueria Ramirez team to keep hundreds of ravers in peak dancing condition as DJs like Kilbourne, Simisea, and Elena Colombi played trance, dub, techno and more. Raving isn’t exactly synonymous with eating deliciously and nutritiously—substantial food is still a rarity at New York City clubs, at least—but, after chatting with de Tilly, I feel like maybe it should be. 

De Tilly has been working at the intersection of nightlife and cuisine since they were growing up in Hong Kong. When they moved to New York City in 2015, they began doing pop-ups as Kowloon Baby at New York City parties, and co-founded the party collective and record label 29 Speedway. In the daytime, they’re also the chef de cuisine at L’Appartement 4F.

“Just being in New York and being someone who's ambitious, I've always had a lot of side hustles,” they told me. “I’ve always worked in the food service industry as well as nightlife, because there was always a crossover of making people feel great.” 

De Tilly and I talked about party food, how experimental cooking aligns with experimental music, and the secret to their fortifying bread pudding.

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Hi Stasia, thanks for sitting down with me! Can you talk a little about where you’ve been overlapping in food and nightlife recently?

Stasia: Last summer and the summer before that, I did the month-long popup at Mansions [on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays], and some day parties too, with the sound engineer Karlala Soundsystem in Prospect Park’s Veil of Cashmere, and private backyard parties. Anywhere that people needed or wanted food. 

And then could you talk a little bit about 29 Speedway, for the unanointed? 

Stasia: 29 Speedway started as a showcase of up-and-coming experimental artists in the winter of 2019, right before COVID hit. We felt like New York nightlife was really focused on money and big parties and raves, and the more hedonistic side. But we didn't really see an opportunity for people to create community and socialize in more chill spaces as an “in bed by midnight” type of thing. So, that was the philosophy behind 29 Speedway. 

Hand in hand with that, we had a desire to release music by smaller artists in the scene. Dorothy Carlos, for example, is someone who, for the last two years, performed every couple 29 Speedway shows; to see her progress as an artist in electro-acoustic music has been totally amazing. That's kind of where it started and how it transitioned into a label. Since then, we've just been releasing the music of artists that we like and support.

When you plan a food pop-up for a venue, or a party, or a festival like Dripping, what kind of things do you have to factor in?

Stasia: Definitely as little perishables as possible. That means going for vegetables that can last at room temperature for longer, like carrots, potatoes, garlic, cabbage, and trying to stay away from vegetables that need more maintenance, like leafy greens. The second thing is food safety. Do we have the capacity to keep things in hot or cold storage? Can we cook things off before we get there? 

And then I would say food that's gonna make you feel good, yeah? Trying to cut back on dairy or things that might upset the stomach, because if people are at an event, they're not gonna be able to run home. You need things that will sustain people and make them feel nourished for a long night. 

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