Magazine
How to Host a Festive Fall Meal Like an Off-Duty Chef
Lauren Schofield — and her friends Anthony Ha and Sadie Mae Burns, of the restaurant Ha’s Đặc Biệt — take entertaining as seriously as their day jobs.
The holidays are a busy season for most, but for those who work in food and wine, it’s crunchtime. “We aren’t going to parties so much as we’re catering them,” says Lauren Schofield, 32, a Brooklyn-based pastry chef who makes desserts for events including weddings. And so in early November, she and her friends Anthony Ha, 32, and Sadie Mae Burns, 29, decided to co-host an autumnal afternoon feast for their industry comrades before everyone’s schedules filled up. The weather was still warm enough to take advantage of Schofield’s backyard in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, and Ha and Burns, the husband-and-wife duo behind Ha’s Đặc Biệt, a Vietnamese American pop-up restaurant, were preparing to launch their first permanent space, scheduled to open on the Lower East Side next month.
In addition to Schofield, the meal’s co-hosts were the chefs Anthony Ha, pictured here, and Sadie Mae Burns, of the Vietnamese American restaurant Ha’s Đặc Biệt.Credit…Lucia Bell-Epstein
Schofield and Burns first met in 2019 when Burns apprenticed for a day at Flora Bar, the since-closed restaurant on the Upper East Side where Schofield then worked. “We gabbed the whole time and exchanged numbers,” says Burns, who met Ha when they were both line cooks at the now-shuttered Lower East Side location of the restaurantMission Chinese. The three of them have been gradually combining their friend groups ever since. Naturally, there’s overlap in the food world, but they’re also close with people who work in fashion, film, music and art.
The last time everyone gathered in such a big way was this past summer, at Burns and Ha’s wedding in Nyack, N.Y., a large outdoor party for which Schofield baked four different lattice-top fruit pies. “We know we like the same things,” says Burns, which made co-hosting a no-brainer. “We’re all good hosts, and we love it, but we wanted to do it together.” They lingered in Schofield’s garden, catching up over Calvados and cake, until well after dark.
