How Food Influencer Dan Pelosi Built an Upstate New York Garden Where Everyone’s Invited

For Dan Pelosi, aka GrossyPelosi—the recipe developer, food content creator, and bestselling author—throwing big food parties and entertaining large groups is as central to his identity as whipping something up for two. (He is Italian, after all.) His second cookbook, Let’s Party: Recipes and Menus for Celebrating Every Day, released in 2025, is not only an ode to crowd-pleasing dishes, but also a dedication to farmers’ markets, tabletop presentation, and vibes—all of the elements for creating an inviting, sensorial atmosphere.

So when it came time to build his dream kitchen garden, Pelosi had a few ideas for what it could look like. Moving between the kitchen and garden would have to be easy. The garden would have to be large enough for raised beds, and a dining area for hosting within earshot of those beds would be necessary, too. He’d have a grill station set up within the garden fence. From inside the kitchen, Pelosi wanted his window view to be of his garden so that "when I wash dishes," he says, "I can see my tomatoes growing."

In 2023, when Pelosi and his boyfriend, Gus Heagerty, moved into a 1850s Greek Revival colonial farmhouse in the Hudson Valley area, Pelosi’s main project was to rebuild the kitchen from scratch. The previous kitchen was part of an addition built in the 1950s inside the garage that had been "really poorly done." They tore the whole thing down and built a new kitchen in its place along with a mud room, pantry, and powder room.

Before the renovation—which was featured by Dwell’s sister site, Domino—began, Pelosi had already been thinking about the future. "My architect and I designed the kitchen knowing that I would eventually want to have a garden off of it, so we thought about access points and how it could potentially lay out," he says. Both Pelosi and Heagerty grew up with parents who gardened, so building a raised bed garden was top of mind. The kitchen took nine months to complete and the garden was built about a year and a half later.

Last spring, the garden build out began, with the team excavating the leftover stone and dirt from the kitchen renovation to level out the backyard for a flat garden. A fence was installed. Custom beds were built. Herbs and vegetables were planted. A picnic table was added. "Every move we made sort of informed the next move," Pelosi says. By mid-August last year, the beds were popping off with more plump tomatoes and zucchinis than Pelosi knew what to do with. His first go as an upstate gardener was, in many ways, successful, but he also learned a lot about how he could improve his growing and entertaining plans for the following summer.

Just after the one-year anniversary of Let’s Party, Pelosi shares how his kitchen garden was originally designed and how it has since evolved into a more inviting communal space. "We’re slowly making updates so we don’t want to go indoors," he says.