Maddy DeVita’s Guide to Pulling Off the Perfect Dinner Party

It’s the Friday morning rush at Paisanos in Boerum Hill. There’s a constant ding of the doorbell as people shuffle in and out of the neighborhood butcher shop. Private chef Maddy DeVita steps inside. Her eyes drift up to the 65-pound stravecchio provolone wheels hanging from the ceiling as she makes her way over to the butcher counter. She’s here to pick up the centerpiece for tonight’s dinner party: a spiraled Italian sausage.

Paisanos is just the first stop on a full itinerary of dinner party prep. It’s days like this, when she’s busy running around the city planning elaborate meals, that brought DeVita out of the kitchen and into the public eye. Her journey started in 2020 on Instagram and TikTok, where DeVita documented her internship at a small agritourism farm in Italy, all the way through her enrollment at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York. But it wasn’t until 2023, when she began posting her “days in the life” as a private chef, and her platform grew exponentially. “That was some of my highest performing content on social media, of just the wild things I was making, all of the courses, and how I was pulling it off narrowly,” she says. Now, with nearly a million followers across both platforms and more than 11,000 followers on Substack, DeVita has expanded her reach. She continues to cook for clients, share weekly recipes through her newsletter, and post daily videos online — while still finding time to bring her friends and family together over food.

As a self-proclaimed control freak with a Virgo mentality, DeVita loves to put her touch on every portion of the evening. This means her apartment is typically the home base for gatherings. In March, she hosted her 12 cousins and their partners in honor of using her grandma’s beloved sauce pot for the first time. “We’re just now undergoing this switch of the family gatherings,” she says. “It’s almost turning over to the new generation, we’re able to host ourselves now.” Tonight’s dinner though isn’t a big affair, it’s just a casual hang with her sister and cousin. So naturally, she decides on a snackable, mix-and-match spread — fresh baguettes from L’Appartement 4F, a tomato and white bean dip, the sausage ring from Paisanos dressed up with mustard and a giardiniera salsa — served alongside bottles of S.Pellegrino Sparkling Natural Mineral Water.

Whether she’s cooking a 20-person private dinner or at home with her fiance, DeVita’s approach to the menu is the same: She lets the ingredients do the heavy lifting. To find the highest-quality products, she never buys groceries online or orders delivery, even though it saves time. She’s a people-person and these ingredient-sourcing days are the best part of her job. “Being a private chef is isolating in a lot of ways because you don’t have any other colleagues,” DeVita says. “Connecting with the butcher behind the counter in the middle of my workday, picking up groceries, or whatever it might be, those are my colleagues in a way.”

These interactions aren’t transactional — she relies on the vendors’ expertise to spark inspiration for her meals. “People are always curious about how I’m using ingredients and share how they’ve used them in the past,” she says. For tonight’s dinner, the butcher at Paisanos recommended parboiling the sausage, before finishing it off in the broiler to get a nice, grill-like char without setting off the smoke alarm. Sometimes, these relationships can lead to exclusive perks. Today, for example, L’Appartement 4F set aside those aforementioned baguettes for DeVita, just in case they sold out.

When DeVita returns home from running errands, she’s back in her element, moving gracefully around her European country-style kitchen. She arranges a simple charcuterie platter with Piave vecchio, mortadella, and Castelvetrano olives on a vintage hand-painted plate she found in Puglia, Italy. Even as a private chef, she doesn’t feel pressured to show off her skills and overwhelm her guests with an over-the-top spread. “The whole point is bringing people together and connecting with friends, and it doesn’t need to be this complicated thing,” she says.

It’s her attention to detail that makes these dinners feel special, not a lengthy prep list. “There are certain things that get forgotten about when you’re hosting in your own apartment that are just assumed when you go out to dinner,” she says. As she sets the table, DeVita uses linen napkins from Six Bells instead of paper and places S.Pellegrino in a wine cooler for easy refills. “It’s not crazy for [a restaurant] to put a bottle of chilled S.Pellegrino on the table and pour it for you,” she says. “It’s about finding those little ways to elevate the meal in a way that’s kind of obvious, but you forget when it comes to being in your own home.”

Her cousin Giulia is a few minutes late, but DeVita enjoys a 10 to 15 minute grace period to put the finishing touches on the table. When it comes to those big-event dinners, she also appreciates the occasional bouquet of flowers, bottle of wine, or even S.Pellegrino for those who don’t drink (though, she doesn’t expect gifts from tonight’s guests who visit often).

As she pulls the sausage out of the oven, her sister and cousin sit around the table, and they dive into the spread. DeVita smears mustard on the baguette, adds a piece of sausage, and sprinkles the giardiniera on top. “Simple but so yummy,” she says. “That’s honestly what people want when they come over, a delicious meal.”