We Need More Food at Raves

A conversation with party chef extraordinaire Stasia de Tilly and a recipe.

This is Dessert After Dark, a special collab edition of the Nightlife Review from Dirt and Cake Zine.

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We Need More Food at Raves

A conversation with party chef extraordinaire Stasia de Tilly.

By Katie Way

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.

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

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? 

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?

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. 

How do you balance a day job in food with nightlife-oriented pop-ups?

I absolutely have to work like an ox to do it all. During the Mansions popup I’d go from prepping from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., heading to 4F till 10:30 p.m., and driving to Mansions to work from 11  p.m. to 3 a.m.. I was very lucky to absolutely adore the staff at both Mansions and 4F—that made the work really easy. Also, cooking is so nourishing to my sense of self, so I can really push my limits for a little while, because it’s worth it. I had a similar schedule pulling off Dripping, working days at 4F and heading to my ghost kitchen to prep for the festival into the wee hours. I handle my busiest times by feeding myself well, trying to sleep as much as I can, and truly surrounding myself with my cheerleaders.

What makes a good party dessert? Do you also try to keep it light?

Honestly, I think that people who go for baked goods at a rave know what they're getting into. [Laughs] It's funny, I've never really seen myself as a sweets person, but I know that people are so diehard for it, and that kind of makes me want to be more of a sweets person, because there’s that kind of love language of desserts! People embrace it so much. If you ride for desserts, like you ride for desserts. Different rules apply.

I think fruit is also really underrated as a dessert, at parties and in general.

Oooh, yes. Soccer game vibes.

A watermelon plate, or a watermelon salad is so good, and it's something that's so easy to put together when you’re trying to feed a bunch of people. At the first year of Dripping, they [handed out] a free bowl of oranges for everyone during the last morning.

So. Let’s talk about the Mansions bread pudding…

I literally did that one time, yeah, that one night only. I did it on a second night with a different flavor, pepita caramel chocolate, but it wasn't selling that well. So, yeah, the first night kind of went hard. 

It was memorable. I posted it on my Instagram story and people had questions! Can you tell me how you dreamt it up?

It’s a low waste thing, actually. I was living next to this bakery called Cyrano's in Greenpoint, and they’d just had a great stale bread sale, so I had some bread left in my freezer. 

I also really like how easy it is to eat. Bread pudding is pretty versatile in terms of what you can put in it. You can get really creative and put coffee in it, put chai in it. There's so many layers of flavor between something crunchy, something sweet and sticky, like Nutella or dulce de leche, and then you can use anything that you can imagine to infuse into the custard. 

Honestly, I think the bread pudding is definitely something that I'm gonna return to again and again. If you cook it, and you don't serve it hot and warm out of the oven and you let it set, it actually becomes so easy to take with you. Plus, there's eggs in it—it's high protein, and we need that from dessert sometimes! It’s just a nourishing food.

Thrilling to hear as a bread pudding convert. OK, pretty broad, but what commonalities attract you to cooking and baking and nightlife?

The biggest commonality between the processes is the different iterations. When you first try a recipe, or when you first adjust a recipe to try something different, sometimes it doesn't turn out, and you just have to keep coming back to it. Sometimes adding or taking out one thing can really change and improve it. I think that’s something you also experience a lot in music production, where sometimes you'll make a track and you'll add all these elements and it'll make it better, and then in other instances, you add too much, and you have to pull back. Even with DJing, sometimes your mix is just too complex. 

And it's the same thing with events, right? You try something one time, you see if it works—working with a new venue or a new artist. How do you set up a space? Are you having lights or not? Are you operating your own bar? As a creative, it’s about the mix of things that you need to think about to make sure that the final product is how you want it to be.

What do you like to eat after, like, the day after a big night out, post-party?

I really like going out to eat after a night out. I think Abuelas in Bushwick is such an amazing spot, and it's just literally grammies in the back making soup. And I love their chilaquiles, so freaking fire. And then, Carmenta’s, like a big meatball sub. And then my last thing is probably soft serve, like L’Industrie pizza. They had this pistachio and concord grape soft serve last fall. I went there after a long Nowadays night, and I was like, this is saving my life. 

Any final thoughts on the intersection of sweet treats and nightlife?

We need more food at raves. 

Katie Way is a writer-editor at Hell Gate who previously worked as a senior staff writer at VICE. She has been known to make a bag of caramel M&Ms vanish on the Uber ride home.

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