She Cooked Dinner for 30. Then She Danced With a Lion.

Entertaining With shows how a party came together, with expert advice on everything from menus to music.

Growing up in Orange County, Calif., Beverly Nguyen, 34, always celebrated Lunar New Year with her family, a custom that her parents brought with them when they emigrated from Vietnam in 1984. When Nguyen moved to New York City in 2010, she in turn carried the tradition with her, sometimes inviting a few friends to her apartment for takeout and other years hosting more elaborate gatherings. This year’s party — a dinner for about 30 people at the TriBeCa events space 102 Franklin Street on the Friday night before the holiday — ended up being particularly meaningful. A week earlier, Nguyen’s paternal grandmother, Dương Thị Hoan, had died at the age of 95, and the loss, Nguyen told her guests, led her to reflect on the importance of “celebrating one another.” Hoan, who was a mother of nine, had a “natural instinct to come together that I think she passed down,” said Nguyen, whose four-year-old downtown New York store, Beverly’s, sells entertaining essentials, including tableware and cooking tools. “Food heals everybody,” she added, “and I think the best thing to do when you’re grieving and emotional is to feed people.”

Earlier that week, Nguyen had traveled to Orange County for the funeral and took the opportunity to shop for ingredients like ginger candies, herbs, sticky rice cakes and pickled daikon at the same Vietnamese grocery stores she frequented as a child. She also brushed up on her culinary skills: “One of my aunts has a restaurant, and I ended up going into the kitchen and learning to cook egg rolls in the deep fryer,” she says.

Two silver trays of cigarettes were put out for guests at the beginning of the night.Credit…David Chow

In the weeks leading up to Têt, as the Lunar New Year is called in Vietnamese, Nguyen also prepared by partaking in some traditional rituals. She cleaned her apartment from top to bottom in order to “absorb fresh energy” into her home, she said, and made a point of avoiding any big life or business changes, like taking on new clients or signing contracts. (The period before Têt is considered an inauspicious time to do so.) She also set up an altar in her apartment to honor her ancestors, arranging family photographs, oranges, bottles of alcohol and incense around a cherry blossom centerpiece. The night before the holiday, she always makes sure to take out the trash, wash her hair and arrive home by midnight — all on the advice of her mother. “If you’re out, then you’ll be out all next year,” she had warned Nguyen when she was a child. Luckily, because her party preceded the actual holiday by a few days, Nguyen and her guests didn’t have to abide by that rule.