Brooke Williams and Josh Liberson have hosted more dinner parties than they can count at their two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. Entertaining at their home on an island in Midcoast Maine, however, is a different thing, largely because it takes at least two boats and, often, an ATV to get from the mainland to the property, which sits on a bluff surrounded by sea and woods.
“There’s nothing casual about showing up here,” says Williams, 58, who’s a creative adviser, editor, artist and activist — she helped organize the National Women’s March in 2017 and is a founding member of the Resistance Revival Chorus, a politically minded collective of singers. Williams has been going to the island since 1987, when her parents and a friend of theirs purchased 15 rugged acres spanning one of its hook-shaped peninsulas, along with the ’70s-era board-and-batten cabin that sat on top of it. (They later added a bathroom with running water and built a second rectangular structure onto the original.) Liberson, 53, the founder of the growth consultancy Origami Advisory, which has worked with clients ranging from Crocs to Christie’s, visited for the first time in 2002, and on day three of that trip, he proposed. Every year since, the couple — and, starting in 2007, their daughter, Ada, 16 — have spent part of their summer on the island, walking, reading, swimming and, in the evenings, building a bonfire on the pebble beach in front of their house for making s’mores.
This year, the couple persuaded their longtime friend the jewelry designer and artist Jill Platner, 54, to make the journey for a weekend in June. They’d previously decided they’d like to have one of her sculptures and that Maine, where the artist spent weekends as a child, would be the best setting for the work. The couple allowed Platner to surprise them with the piece, which turned out to be a series of vertically hinged copper winglike forms meant to move with the breeze. The artist opted to install it herself, hanging it from the branch of a pine tree at the head of the property’s shoreside trail, and Williams and Liberson chose to mark the occasion with an al fresco dinner.
Around 6:30, the group gathered beside a picnic table overlooking the bay and toasted with Lambrusco (or sparkling tea, in Ada’s case) before enjoying oysters that Liberson had broiled with garlic-and-tarragon butter. After that, they all went back up to the kitchen, where Liberson started doling out the next course: pan-seared lobster tail and claw on a bed of sugar snap pea and garlic scape purée, crowned with sautéed pea shoots and a sprig of dill. Two additional courses followed. Liberson appreciated having had the better part of the day to cook, and everyone felt grateful to have had so much time together. “It’s intimate here,” says Liberson. “You’re really in our life. And while big dinners can be a nice way of meeting people, this was about someone we just love.”
The attendees: Williams and Platner, the meal’s lone guest and guest of honor, met at a TriBeCa loft party in the early ’90s. “I beelined to her because she looked so cool,” says Platner, who’d just sold her first jewelry collection to Barneys and asked Williams if she’d model the designs, which included pendants and earrings featuring beach stones wrapped in silver. Williams agreed, and they became fast friends. “Whenever things feel like they’re really going south, I just know that if I can get myself to Jill and be with her for a little bit, it’s all going to be fine,” says Williams.
The table: Once Platner had helped Liberson level the picnic table, the family members set it with antique silverware; glasses from Il Buco Vita, the tableware line curated by Donna Lennard, the founder of New York’s Il Buco restaurants; and a wavy-handled glass pitcher by the New York-based designer Sophie Lou Jacobsen. There were also lapis-colored linen napkins from the craft-focused homewares company RW Guild rolled and secured by asymmetrical bronze and silver napkin rings designed by Platner, as well as pots of creeping rosemary and, for added decoration, a hollowed-out lobster head that was a sign of things to come.
The food: The menu, like Platner’s sculpture, was site-specific. “To share this place and its magic with Jill,” as Williams puts it, the couple sourced produce from a local farm, wine from a local shop and seafood gathered from local waters. Then Liberson got to work. Both he and Williams like to cook — she baked a loaf of no-knead bread for the occasion — but Liberson is especially passionate about it. (His mother was the under-$25 restaurant critic for the Washington Post, and the year he turned 30, he briefly interned at the esteemed New York restaurant Blue Hill.) He made a compound butter using the reserved lobster shells and mixed it with potatoes, served them both mashed and in hash-brown-style discs. Together, the potatoes formed a base for the main course of halibut, on top of which Liberson placed roasted cherry tomatoes and curly endive, as well as garlic scapes. Those plates, which also contained a neat pile of roasted potatoes cut into one-inch cylinders were garnished with nasturtium leaves. Dessert was simpler: fresh strawberries and hand-whipped cream eaten during a multicolor sunset.
The drinks: For the wine, Liberson called on his and Williams’s sommelier friend Ralph Dorcin. “I texted him the menu and got what he told me to buy. Everyone should have this service,” says Liberson. That meant a bright Italian white for the lobster course and a Nebbiolo for the halibut. The couple went rogue when it came to the Lambrusco, though. “This will probably be mortifying to Ralph because for reasons I don’t understand, you should never pair oysters with Lambrusco,” Liberson says. “But you also can’t have a party without something bubbly.”
The music: Ada made a dinnertime playlist that included songs by SZA, Sabrina Carpenter and Prince. “I knew it was a hit when even Séan [the photographer for this story] was singing along,” says Williams.
The conversation: Topics of conversation included the patina Platner applies to her pieces, Ada’s summer plans, Liberson’s beloved Makita electric weed whacker, the Resistance Revival Chorus’s upcoming appearance at this fall’s Brooklyn Folk Festival, the otters who used to be the family’s neighbors and the whale that Williams’s mother saw swimming up the bay last summer.
An entertaining tip: If you’re eating outside, Williams and Liberson suggest buying some tablecloth clamps at your local hardware store. “They saved us,” says Liberson. The pair also chose to use rocks from the pebble beach by their house as place cards because, says Williams, “they don’t blow away.” Ada selected the stones and wrote the appropriate initials on each with a marker. “This meal felt like a shared project and a shared celebration,” says Williams, “and another example of how having these kinds of connections between people is very life affirming.”
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