Cookbook Club: Pie Picnic
Summertime, and the living is easy. Easy as a Summer Friday. Easy as pie.
Our next Cookbook Club gathering is a Pie Picnic featuring Erin Jeanne McDowell's The Book on Pie. Join us for an evening focused on finding a sense of ease — that ephemeral feeling of childhood summers and long, lazy vacation days amid the chaos of life. Gather around our picnic tables in the beautiful Fabrik community space in DUMBO to share your favorite pie (savory or sweet) and nostalgic summer activities to reawaken a sense of curiosity, playfulness, and joy.
Come hungry. Come with a pie. Come ready to share slices and an easy, breezy evening together. We’ll have picnic blankets and refreshing drinks ready to welcome you, the playlist queued up, and mesh totes ready to take home extra slices and use for the rest of your summer beach, pool, picnic, and farmer's market adventures.
What to Expect:
For each gathering, we focus on recipes from a featured author's cookbook. For our Pie Picnic, it’s hard to think of one more perfect than Erin Jeanne McDowell's The Book on Pie. Whether you are a seasoned baker or pie-curious, you'll find invaluable pro tips for perfecting your technique and inspiring recipes of sweet and savory pies of all kinds. Making a perfect pie takes knowledge and practice, but Erin's detailed recipes and tips make it easy to master any kind of crust, filling, and topping you could imagine. If you want more instruction, head over to her YouTube channel and website for tutorials to ensure pie-baking success!
Our friends, Ali and Laura, Co-founders of The Art of Fashion and Food, will set the scene for the evening with a nostalgic picnic tablescape, ready for us to fill with our pies.
What better to accompany pie than coffee and ice cream? Jeremy, Founder of Preface Coffee, will be serving up affogatos featuring one of his beautiful, intentional, story-driven roasts in a decaf version to help us combat a sugar crash, but still get some sleep at the end of the evening.
We'll have lots of activities and surprises to keep the magic going throughout the evening.
We're partnering with our friend, Roni, Founder of Otherwell, for a crossover collaboration with her The Other Hour happy hour series. Stop by the Other Hour Game Table for Uno and Connect Four throughout the evening. There will be prizes for the winners!
Our friend, Michelle, Co-founder of CoSee, is joining us to host our Summer Reading Book Swap to help you find your next poolside, beachside, or commuting read. The CoSee team believes in the power of community and sustainability. Every book is coming to the table recommended by another reader in our community. Bring an old favorite you are ready to pass along, and find your next great read to take home!
Take a few moments to reflect with our Letter Writing workshop focused on finding a sense of ease. We'll lead you with a brief exercise and some prompts to slow down and capture your thoughts in a heartfelt letter. Think of it like sending a letter from summer camp.
Stay tuned. We'll be announcing our other partners and activities soon!
Bring:
A pie (sweet or savory, homemade or store-bought)
A summer read you’re ready to pass on for our Summer Reading Book Swap
An empty stomach and open heart
Rough Agenda:
5:00pm: Gather. Display your pie on our picnic table. Grab a drink and join us to toast a beautiful Summer Friday.
6:00pm: Make some new friends. Eat your fill of pies of all varieties. Embrace the easy feeling of summer with our summer reading book swap, game table, letter-writing exercise, and more activities TBD.
8:00pm: Farewell! Exchange contact info and take some leftover pie to go. We'll have take-home containers ready for you.
How to Prepare:
✅ Sign up to attend
📚 Pick a book to swap – If you'd like to participate in the Summer Reading Book Swap, bring a book from your bookshelf that you’re ready to pass along to another reader.
🥧 Bake a pie – Pick a recipe from The Book on Pie, or use tips from the cookbook to perfect one of your favorites. If you are coming with a partner or friend, you are welcome to team up. No time to bake? No problem — bring something to share that fits the theme.
📓 Add your dish to our recipe sign up sheet along with any dietary notes. Recipes from The Book on Pie are listed in the 2nd tab.
🧺 Bring your contributions, ready to share – A Microwave and fridge are available. We'll have plates, cups, and silverware on hand.
Meet Our Partners:
Michelle Aboodi, Co-Founder of CoSee
Michelle is a passionate advocate for supporting community and sustainable practices. She has worked in business operations at CNN, social sustainability and human rights at Unilever, and environmental sustainability and data analytics at Nike/Converse, and now, at Deckers Brands (parent company to HOKA, UGG, Teva). Michelle and her co-founder, Sonia Ketkar, met at the third space, Fabrik. Both shared a love of New York City neighborhoods, sustainable practices (like composting!), and creature comforts. They are building a home for people ready to make sustainability a part of their everyday in the form of an IRL gathering place and online store selling local and responsibly-sourced food and beverages, used books, high-integrity/sustainably-oriented products. They are committed to goods you can count on and want to use over and over again. Follow CoSee on Instagram to hear when they officially launch! When she's not in the weeds at work, Michelle loves feeding her community homemade chocolate chip cookies and popcorn, writing for her Substack, Drunk on Democracy, and practicing yoga.
Roni Bradley, Founder of Otherwell
Roni Bradley is a filmmaker, wine enthusiast, and founder of Otherwell—a creative community exploring alternative wellness through connection, creativity, and joy. Known for her experiential events like “The Other Hour” at Fabrik, Roni brings people together through storytelling, thoughtful curation, and a deep love for food and culture. With roots in Memphis and a decade of hospitality experience in NYC, she believes the dinner table is a sacred place for community, connection, and inspiration.
Allison Mendoza and Laura Garcia, Co-Founders of The Art of Fashion and Food
Allison Mendoza is the daughter of Peruvian immigrants and a dreamer who believes in the power of reinvention. After starting her career in finance, she pivoted to pursue fashion, studying at Parsons and spending over a decade at Victoria’s Secret, where she rose to Associate Vice President of Design. A long-time advocate for diversity in creative industries and mentorship, she now works as a stylist, events curator, and business consultant.
Laura Garcia was born in Mexico and raised in the U.S., later reconnecting with her roots in Guadalajara. A former teacher turned digital nomad, she traveled to over 30 countries before the age of 30. Her journey led her to champion Latina entrepreneurship and the beauty of global textiles, founding a platform to empower women to live and work freely around the world.
Together, they created The Art of Fashion and Food to explore the vibrant intersection of style, cuisine, and culture. Through immersive, thoughtfully curated events, they bring people together in celebration of art, identity, and sensory storytelling.
Jeremy Bradford, Founder Preface Coffee
Jeremy Bradford is a father to Elizabeth, a partner to an incredible and loving wife Anna, an avid reader of a wide range of books, and the founder of Preface Coffee. As someone who is relatively introverted and navigating the world with a hearing impediment, Jeremy has always found solace in the company of books. For many years, he aspired to a life as an academic and as a student you’d often find him wandering through the stacks of libraries, browsing through bookstores, and reading and writing in coffee shops.
Over time, Jeremy has come to see and experience each sip of coffee as a vessel for storytelling; whether it be stories about those involved at the level of the farms, or for the person drinking the coffee to have memories recalled as a response to familiar flavors that each coffee might offer, or an excuse to catch up with an old friend.
Jeremy has over ten years of experience in the coffee industry, having primarily worked as a barista while teaching himself to roast at home. Beyond reading, he enjoys time at home with his family, watching movies, and trying different cuisines.
Preface Coffee is a small roastery based in Long Island City. The name is an ode to a season in Jeremy’s life of reading the preface of a book at coffee shops, and conceptually the brand seeks to merge the world of books and coffee.
As publishers of noteworthy coffees, we treat the farmers and producers as authors, and our roasting process as doing the final editing touches of their great work. Our aim, as much as possible, is to place front and center the work of those who grow and produce coffees around the world, and to elevate the small pleasure that a cup of coffee brings to many of us as we begin our days.
At the core of it all, we roast coffees that we enjoy drinking not only because of their flavor but because of the untold potential they hold for connecting us to places and people we might not otherwise experience.
More Partners To Be Announced Soon!
Meet Your Hosts:
Letters from the Table
Letters from the Table is a collection of love letters to people, places & times that changed us. It is a place where sensory memories are expressed through recipes. Most importantly, it is an invitation to the table — to experience intensely personal perspectives expressed through food and to share your own. Sign up for the newsletter to receive periodic letters, recipes, and atmospheric content.
We host our cookbook club events as members of the Cookbook Club NY community, which Stephh Lau started to spread the joy of hosting cookbook clubs. Join her Discord group to learn about other Cookbook Club chapters and events!
Joni Goldbach
Joni, the creator of Letters from the Table, is a fractional Product leader supporting business leaders and teams in reaching their goals and creating meaningful experiences for their customers. She is passionate about finding and creating moments of connection in her work and through passion projects like Letters from the Table.
Fabrik
Welcome to Fabrik! We are on a mission to uplift communities and foster serendipitous connections in real life.
Fabrik is a home for communities where everyone has a place to belong. With spaces designed to feel more like your living room than your office, Fabrik’s third spaces are vibrant hubs where people can come together in real life, explore interests, forge meaningful connections, and build a sense of community.
If you'd like to come early and work for the day, day passes are available for $29 here.
Event FAQ
Do I have to cook and bring a dish to share?
This is a potluck event designed for folks who love to cook and explore the perspectives, cultures and history shared through cookbooks, but we get it. Schedules get busy, and it's not always possible to cook something for a weekday event. In a pinch, pick up something to share that fits the theme. As Ina Garten says, "store-bought is fine"! If you're coming with a partner or friend, you're welcome to bring a pie together, or a pie plus something to go with it.
How do you handle allergies and food safety?
Cookbook Club events are potlucks where we share a meal of home-cooked dishes together. We expect attendees to use common-sense food handling and storage when preparing for the event. We have a microwave and refrigerator on site for reheating or keeping food cool. However, if you are concerned about food safety or storage during transit, consider bringing a dish that is safe to store and serve at room temperature.
We do everything that we reasonably can to make sure that all who come to our events have enough to eat and don’t leave hungry. There are gluten-free, vegan, and dairy-free options in the cookbook. Please reach out to us ahead of time if you have food allergies or dietary restrictions we should be aware of. On our recipe signup list, we ask that folks list allergens so that other attendees can plan ahead.
Can I receive a refund for my ticket?
We use RSVPs to plan for the number of attendees and ticket pricing to cover our costs in hosting. Unfortunately, we cannot grant refunds, but you are welcome to pass your ticket on to someone else.
Is there an age restriction?
Our events are 21+. We will have a selection of non-alcoholic and potentially some lightly alcoholic beverages (think wine and beer) on hand to accompany our shared meals and enhance the experience. The goal is social lubrication, not inebriation. We aim to provide a safe and comfortable space where folks can connect. We will check IDs as needed, and folks who are displaying unwelcome behavior will be asked to leave.
The artwork in the event image is amazing! Who is the artist?
That's Cherry Pie by Pop Art artist Roy Lichtenstein. Head over to MoMA to see his Drowning Girl on display on the 4th Floor.
Where can I find more events like this?
There are lots of other gatherings coming up to keep the good vibes going.
Keep an eye on the Fabrik calendar for more upcoming gatherings in Tribeca and Dumbo.
Follow Letters from the Table on substack and on Instagram to be the first to know about our future events.
And… to find more Cookbook Club Chapters in the local NY/NJ community and beyond, sign up for Stephh’s Cookbook Club Community Discord! We’re just one of many fantastic local groups.
Please note: By signing up for this event you agree to receive email communication from us and from Fabrik related to this gathering and future offerings. You can unsubscribe at any time. Photos will be taken during the event for promotional purposes. By attending, you consent to your image being used in future marketing materials. If you have any concerns, please let us know.