MEET: THE WILD HONEY PIE — Eric Weiner + Lucy Harumi Dunning
Eric Weiner + Lucy Harumi Dunning of The Wild Honey Pie. Photo credit: Joran Feller
From interning at MTV London to a music blog, enter The Wild Honey Pie. Eric Weiner + Lucy Harumi Dunning talk to The Dishing about new music discovery, summers upstate, climate change + getting back to live music events.
Interview: Susie Davidson Powell
Photos: Kiki Vassilikis, Jordan Fuller, Emilio Herce.
Shoot location: Hotel Lilien (Tannersville) + Stonehill’s Farmhouse (Accord)
Tastemaker: Eric Weiner + Lucy Harumi Dunning: IG @harumi4
The Wild Honey Pie | thewildhoneypie.com IG: @thewildhoneypie
Hometown: Eric: Somers, N.Y. + Lucy: Washington D.C.
Current city: Eric: Saugerties, N.Y. | Lucy: Brooklyn, N.Y.
Personal style: Eric: Camp. We both have a lot of band t- shirts. And it would be hard to find me not wearing a pair of Blundstones. Lucy: I definitely enjoy vintage shopping when I'm traveling. I only wear the Levi's ribcage jeans. I think I have about 10 pairs!
Favorite classic cocktail: Eric: I very rarely drink, but if I am going to then I'm having a pickle vodka martini made with Grillo’s Pickles juice. But I’m usually having a non-alc Phony Negroni though. Lucy: I spent a lot of time working in the cocktail world, so I actually love going all over the place, but I always really love a classic gin martini. Or like a really good pina colada.
Favorite bar or venue ever: Eric: So upstate, I love Station Bar in Woodstock. And in the city, I love Troost - yeah, they've got Negronis on tap. Lucy: I would be remiss not to mention Arlene's Grocery in the Lower East Side which I also manage. They just celebrated 30 years of being around. But also growing up in D.C., The 9:30 Club is a legend… My parents went to the original. I was an intern there in high school and I think they've been around now for almost - I want to say maybe 48 years? Almost 50.
What are you currently listening to? Eric: I'm listening to Quinnie, an indie rock musician from NJ. I'm also listening to a lot of Joanna Sternberg. This is an artist I really adore. Lucy: I love Al Green and recently I've been listening to a lot of him. Cautious Clay has been releasing new music which has been great. And I’m definitely a big fan of Amyl and the Sniffers and Mannequin Pussy and all the punk girlies.
The Dishing talks with tastemakers in the hospitality industry + trailblazers at the intersection of food, culture + art. Today we’re talking with Eric + Lucy of The Wild Honey Pie about introducing people to their new favorite bands, pizza parties for climate change, the nostalgia of summer camp + getting back to live music.
Thanks for talking to The Dishing! First off, how do you describe The Wild Honey Pie? What’s your elevator pitch?
EW: Oh, man, Lucy, can I take this one? Please?! I mean, The Wild Honey Pie is a creative agency that’s built on music discovery and community, bringing people together, finding a way to connect musicians with their favorite bands and creating lifelong memories out of these opportunities that really do help people meet their new best friends and find an excuse to fall in love with new music.
That’s an awesome soundbite, Eric! I know you were an intern for MTV London and launched The Wild Honey Pie in 2009 after transforming a personal food blog into a music blog. By 2010 you were making live music videos in NYC. Was this an organic shift into the music sphere and how has The Wild Honey Pie evolved from those early days?
EW: You know, circa 2009, there were a lot of great live session blogs out there like La Blogotheque and Yours Truly, and some great videography video companies. You know, we were filming our Buzzsession series at the time, finding artists that wanted free music videos and creating an opportunity to build a platform for music discovery through their music videos. So, that mission is still alive and well in what we do today – there's just a little bit more to it.
Of course, the live events and experiential side of The Wild Honey Pie is all about community where these parties are essentially a platform to showcase musicians that we love, or we've fallen in love with, to help people find their next favorite artist. We were doing that back in 2009 with the live videos and album and concert reviews, but now today we're helping people discover their next favorite artists through these intimate experiences and parties we throw all over the country. These parties, though, are also a platform to film live videos – we just do them at our parties. And taking it a step further, we also release the live audio as a live album from these parties when the artists sign off on it and want us to do that. We have about 200 tracks up on Spotify that we've released over the last few years from our various parties and, of course, from our summer camps as well.
Lucy, you grew up in Washington DC, attended the University of North Carolina and have traveled quite extensively including Japan, Peru and Brazil. When did you two meet and how do your unique backgrounds shape your current Wild Honey Pie roles?
LHD: Yes – but North Carolina State, actually. So my background is mostly in hospitality. I mean, I studied elementary education at NC State, but my dad was in the industry when I was a kid so I kind of grew up around restaurants and bars, and my mom was really into live music which kind of shaped my interest. D.C has a lot of really amazing music venues, so live music in particular has always been kind of a cornerstone of how I spend my personal time, or what I like to be involved in.
When I moved to New York, I was working in hospitality and had been trying to do a little bit of soul searching. I knew I always loved being around music and being involved with it growing up so when I found out about the dinner parties Wild Honey Pie had been putting together it just seemed such a perfect marrying of live music that I love with things about the hospitality industry that I love. I applied for the internship and Eric and I very much clicked. I think having a background in hospitality in the service industry aligns with production and putting events together because you're constantly working on how to see the bigger picture and how to see the picture happening right now, while finding a way to tie those together. I definitely come at it from the boots-on-the-ground side of things, working with my hands and being involved directly, and Eric is really the dreamer in all of this. I think that combination works really well.
Eric + Lucy of The Wild Honey Pie at Hotel Lilien in Tannersville for their Phantogram x Pizza Party. | Photo: Kiki Vassilakis
You clearly love food as much as music. What are your childhood memories of home cooking or dining out?
EW: Oh, my God. Well, I've been cooking ever since I was, like, a really little kid. I remember my mom always tells the story that when I was 10 years old I asked her to buy me one of those kitchen blow torches so I could make crème brûlée. I was watching Emeril and various Food Network stars and asking my mom to print out recipes so I could try to recreate those moments for my family. So I've been cooking since I was a kid, just really passionate about food. I was even considering dropping out of Colorado University at Boulder to go to the Culinary Institute. I ended up not doing that, but it was still the impetus and inspiration behind starting The Wild Honey Pie as a blog because of my passion for food and cooking and eating out. When I was in college, I did a few vacations with my Dad where we ate our way through various areas like Napa and New York City. I've always been really passionate about the hospitality industry and dining in general – the creativity behind it and how similar it is to the music industry. It made the transition from food to music fairly easy and allowed me to bring together my passions in a way that felt really natural.
LHD: So my Dad bartended for a really long time. My mom was also in the service industry for a bit, and the friends my parents had were always involved in bars and restaurants in D.C., in particular. Of course the creative industry is really heavily tied to hospitality: Most of the artists who live also work in bars and restaurants. So music and food have been so connected in my life and in my brain. There are very few things in life that are such a love language for people, whether culturally or in their immediate family – and food and music are always two of those prominent things. Like when you work in a bar restaurant, there's a family meal and so creating an environment where people can experience that – even if it's not in their own home, or, you know, like their grandmother's best recipe – they can still get that feeling in another environment and experience that. They're very intertwined.
Eric + Lucy addressing guests at The Wild Honey Pie x Stonehill’s Farmhouse feat. Passion Pit. | Photo: Kiki Vassilakis
Okay, let’s take the same approach with music. What were the formative bands or genres that got you hooked? Was it music of your teens or music video collective of the 2010s?
EW: Music has always been an important part of my life with my parents, and my dad, in particular, exposing me to a lot of a lot of music early on. Obviously, the Beatles and the Beach Boys and the Four Seasons or Jackson 5 and all these different artists that were icons of years past. But it was really in my high school days where I started gravitating towards more to EMO, rock, pop punk and stuff, listening to bands like The Starting Line and Dashboard Confessional and Taking Back Sunday – some of these artists we’re actually having the opportunity of working with now, which is pretty surreal for me. I would listen to this music and me and my friends would make music videos for these songs, just on our own, with my dad's camcorder. So even early on in my high school years, I was doing a lot of the things that later in life would bring me joy professionally which is kind of fun to think about now.
As I went off to college in Colorado, I was still listening to some of the same artists, but transitioned into the world of indie rock with Death Cab for Cutie, The Shins, Iron & wine and Bright Eyes, for example — so many of these artists that were pivotal in my life. I still remember where I was the first time I heard “Poison Oak” by Bright Eyes – a moment that changed my life forever. And same thing with Death Cab for Cutie. I'm actually in Brooklyn right now to see them at Brooklyn Paramount tonight. [laughs] You know, those years were really pivotal to forming my identity around the relationship I would have in discovering music for myself and also helping my friends and lovers find music for themselves as well. You know, helping people discover their next favorite artist is one of the greatest joys in my life and something I've always indulged.
LHD: Yeah, I think it’s kind of similar to Eric when I was growing up. I think music has such a sense memory to it as well. So, like, there's music that will come on and you have that very brief moment of being transported back to when you used to hear it all the time. My mom used to always play records when we were growing up, and it was like Sticky Fingers or, you know, Mermaid Avenue or Ryan Adams and they're just so associated with Saturday afternoons at home and like this comfort feeling. So I think really just the kind of emotion that can be tied to it and the reaction that you have with certain music and how it can tie to experiences in your brain was always there from the beginning, but I also really discovered loving going to live music.
Even when performances are structured they're different because so much of it is also about the crowd that's there and the interactions that you have between a performer and the people there to see them perform. So for me, I think I had always loved music and D.C. has a lot of great venues, but I saw a new side of it when I moved to New York. There's so many more people here, so many creatives, so many opportunities to see someone new, whether going to a local venue and knowing maybe one band but you go for all the openers and find out about new bands that are amazing, right? Sometimes those bands don't even have recorded music. I think the live aspect of it and the experience you get is so unique every time.
I also work in a venue in the city [Arlene’s Grocery] and being able to connect not only to music as we listen to it at home, but also the emotion that an artist puts into it when they're performing at a live performance is so intimate. You know, you could see these artists at Brooklyn Steel or a bigger space, but seeing how they perform and interpret their music in such a small space is just so personal. I think that’s really something that I find myself chasing whenever I'm at live music. I guess New York really helped to kind of expand me.
The Wild Honey Pie Pizza Party. Photo: Kiki Vassilakis
By now, The Wild Honey Pie is well established and you have solid sponsorships which allows you to donate to different charities. How did you secure your sponsors and why is the charitable component important to you?
EW: Yeah, I mean you know, the charitable component is something that we've just started this year. We're gonna keep joining it as long as we can. Financially, it was a risk, but something that we felt was a risk worth taking and ultimately, the reason behind it is in part because of my climate anxiety and my concerns about the state of the world. So I feel the best solution to climate anxiety is climate action, whether it's making sure that you're composting and doing all the little things right and setting an example for the rest of the music industry. We're mostly donating all of our ticket sales to environmental nonprofits. If we can do it in our own small way, maybe some of the larger venues can take note of, you know, our lack of single use plastic and all the other things that we're putting in place.
Ultimately it’s about working with brands like Grillo’s Pickles and Spindrift Sparkling Water who believe in us so much as a small business that they're willing to pay a little bit extra so we can donate those ticket sales to charity. We're not able to do any of this without the brands that see what we're doing, and see it’s meaningful, important. We believe in this so much, we're gonna put our money where our mouth is. So to the extent that we can take a large source of revenue and divert it to some really amazing causes—perfect.
Upstate, The Wild Honey Pie is known for bringing live bands and Brooklyn’s Paulie Gee’s pizza to venues like Glens Falls House + Hotel Lilien. Is this a recurring upstate collab or are you focusing equally on events nationwide?
EW: So, I live in the Hudson Valley, and I used to live in the Capital Region. I was in Troy for a year and now I'm in Saugerties, so doing stuff near where I live is obviously very important to me. I can announce that we just secured a 2026 exclusive upstate deal with Hotel Lilien so they'll be our home for at least six pizza parties next year. I'm very excited about that. We love their property, the good location and the actual hotel itself. It's just impeccable. And the people are amazing people who really care about what we're doing and about artists.
We also plan on producing events around the country, even England. So, we do have our sights set on getting hyper local, but at the same time working with communities all over the country. Whenever we go to any location, whether upstate or L.A or Austin or wherever it might be, we do hire the vast majority of our team locally. Even with Paulie Gee, because we work with him and other chefs to interpret pizza recipes as well, we hire the pizza chefs locally, so it’s definitely important to us to hire local teams, whether for video, photo, chefs, producers or hosts. Typically, me and Lucy will go to these events, wherever they are, but as we grow we’re adding more team members to the mix so if there's four or five events in a month, then me or Lucy can have someone swap in for us to execute them the same way we always do, just with slightly different personnel.
Eric, I know you grew up in Westchester, NY before attending the University of Boulder, CO, and you were living in Troy in the Capital Region before Saugerties. What originally brought you to the Collar City? And, Lucy, do you have any connections upstate?
EW: Yeah, I'm in Saugerties now. My wife's an environmental attorney for New York State, so we really just wanted to be a bus ride away from her work. We lived on Washington Park in Troy, and we really fell in love with it. I mean, there are few farmers markets as beautiful as Troy’s so that was a big part of moving there. And the amazing food scene. I love what Meadow Lark does. We love Jacob & Alejandro, and all the amazing local establishments we fell in love with.
LHD: My mom actually grew up in Elmira, N.Y. We spent quite a lot of time going to the lakes when I was younger. Her mom was there for a really long time before she passed away, so, yeah, I’ve always loved being upstate. I mean, I love living in New York City, but I also love leaving to come upstate – it's so beautiful and nice to have it so accessible.
Since you’ve both spent quite a bit of time upstate, where are 3 of your favorite spots for breakfast, lunch or dinner in the Hudson Valley or Capital District?
EW: Alright! So, I’ll say Van’s for dinner in Albany. I think that place is so friggin' good. Yeah, it's Vietnamese. And then Chleo in Kingston is probably my favorite restaurant in the world and, depending when, they often have enough vegan options on the menu. Also Brushland Eating House in Bovina. Amazing restaurant. Love what they're doing. And of course, gotta love Moonburger, based in the Hudson Valley – I’m really proud of what they're doing.
LHD: Yeah, for me, I like Harana Market in Accord, although I'm not sure how they're adjusting their hours and set-up right now, but it’s Filipino and so amazing. The food's so good and it's such a beautiful space. If I'm upstate for our events, I will sometimes drive 30 to 45 minutes out of the way to get it on my way home!
EW: I think my number one best food in the Hudson Valley is Lagusta’s Luscious in New Paltz. It’s all-vegan and they have what I think is, maybe, the best sandwich I've ever had in my life – this Buffalo seitan sandwich that'll blow your mind. And they have some of the world's best chocolate, too.
SDP: Nice. So, Eric, I take it you are vegan?
EW: Me? Yeah, yeah.
You sometimes do On The Mountain party weekends at ski resorts. Can you talk a little more about the range of events you put on and anything new on the horizon?
EW: Yeah, so we have four concepts right now that are out in the world, that have been developed over the last say 5, 10, 15 years. We have the Dinner Party series, which is dinner with your favorite artist in the world. They perform a concert in a restaurant for about 50 to 80 people. It's our most elevated option and it's $100 bucks. Then we have the pizza parties, which is what we've been doing upstate, as well as all over the country last year with the help of Hilton. And we do have our Welcome Campers and ski trip On The Mountain. So, it’s either finding ways to take advantage of three hours with our guests in the case of dinner and pizza parties, or we go a bit more in depth over the course of two nights with On The Mountain, our '80s themed wellness and music weekend, and Welcome Campers which we haven't done since 2019, but we're figuring out how to bring that back with help from the right brands to see what that looks like. Maybe making friendship bracelets or swimming in the lake with your favorite artist or seeing your favorite musician in the world playing around the campfire while you make s’mores? Definitely leaning into my roots from when I was a little kid, going to sleepaway camp in Pennsylvania. Leaning into the nostalgia….
Photo: Emilio Herce/The Wild Honey Pie
Beyond events, you’re also a creative agency, is that right? Are people hiring you as a creative agency offering services on the side or is it all in the service of Wild Honey Pie?
EW: We produce a lot of music videos for artists, both animated live action and live session style videos. We also make commercials. Brands that help pay for our events look to us to make music-centric commercials they'd post on socials or even broadcast someday, I hope. And of course, we’re hired by record labels and brands to throw album release parties that have the similar magic to what you see with the pizza parties and dinner parties, but a slightly different mold. We still put our name on it, but it's structured a bit differently. We are always a fan-facing creative agency. People will always know if we're involved with something, but sometimes our name takes a back seat to the artist; other times we're the presenter alongside the artist.
We’ve talked before about restaurants and bars reporting less foot traffic since the lockdown and a documented loneliness epidemic connected to the rise of remote work, social media and the pandemic. After 2020, how did you revive momentum for events?
EW: Yeah, I mean, Lucy can speak to this as well, but we kept things going as best as we could with a few different partnerships that we had. We did a kind of a playlist pairing with different restaurants where we engineered it so, like, your email unlocked a certain menu item and that was the best we could do. I had a really tricky time in 2020. But slowly but surely we brought back our live events, and eventually our dinner party series with Topo Chico and a couple other brands to the point where we were actually producing more events post-pandemic than we were beforehand in some ways, also paying artists more than we ever had.
We really used the pandemic as an opportunity to really put a magnifying glass on our business model which - very transparently - just wasn't working pre-pandemic. We really used it as an opportunity to re-evaluate how we could build a more equitable business for all our team members, for artists, photographers, video people. And you know, obviously, this is still work in progress, but we're really proud of progress we’ve been able to make and re-envisioning what’s possible for The Wild Honey Pie from a business model perspective.
LHD: Yeah, one of the things we noticed with the pandemic was that we were already doing these intimate events. We've always done videos and animation, you know, things that really are built around connections and quality over quantity. And so in a lot of ways, when the pandemic happened, brands were spending money at these huge, tens of thousands of people festivals… and everyone got freaked out about the idea of going to those so they started to reevaluate how they were spending their activation budgets or supporting the music industry and creative industries.
We've been creating these events that fit with that for a really long time, whether it was our dinner or pizza parties, or even On The Mountain or Welcome Campers, which are still our biggest events with maybe 300 people at any given time. What we offer was already built for people wanting smaller, more intimate events, where you're connecting and it's not just about getting as many people in the room as humanly possible. ‘Cause we reach, you know, I guess “the masses” for lack of a better term, with our videos and the video and photos we put out afterwards. So we don't really need to pick one or the other, you know? The pandemic allowed us to step back and take the time to hone in on a bunch of things and make it as efficient as possible. And really my biggest goal for us is longevity. There's a lot of small companies that have amazing ideas that can't find a way to scale in the right way. They can't find a way to grow without having to compromise or lose part of their identity. For us, we are a creative agency, but so many creative agencies stay behind the scenes just executing someone else's idea. For us, the Wild Honey Pie is so much of a personality – it's its own brand so people will come to the events because we're throwing it. Figuring out a way to grow while keeping that identity has been the biggest goal for us and we're definitely seeing the results.
Imagine your ideal day or night out. If you could go anywhere in the world with no limits on costs or reservations, where would you go and how would the day or night unfold?
LHD: I'm so bad at answering this [laughs] because my list is so very long, but I think I would probably go back to Japan. I've been a couple times with my grandmother, but they've always been family trips and so I haven't necessarily been able to really explore on my own. Like I would love to go back to Kyoto. I'd love to go back to Tokyo. I'd love to go up north and go skiing. So – I think I’d probably do, like, a pretty big lunch in Tokyo, and walk around for a really long time. I like to always check to see if there's live music, maybe around Shinjuku, and then, yeah, just like getting a nightcap (or a few nightcaps) is always a nice way to end it, especially in that Golden Gai area just because there's so many, like, four-seat bars that are amazing. They're open all night but I like to leave it up to how the night unfolds. Sometimes it's good to get to bed early, sometimes you really just gotta let it play out.
EW: I've been lucky enough to travel to some amazing destinations: Sonoma, Napa, Copenhagen, Japan. Those are some pretty once-in-a-lifetime trips. I travel differently than Lucy, mostly because I'm vegan and I don't really drink. I think that Scandinavia would be a real dream come true in part because of how much I love the music from that area. Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Sweden – I’d love to spend some more time there. And then just like an overall Euro trip. I'd love to visit Poland – I've heard the vegan food there is amazing. Spend more time in Germany. I have a trip planned this fall… going to Morocco with my wife, so that should be an incredible once-in-a-lifetime type trip as well.
What would be your dream Wild Honey Pie event?
EW: Oh, my God, this is such a good question. I think in some ways it's Death Cab for Cutie at Laser Wolf in New York. I mean, that's one of my favorite bands in the world and one of my favorite restaurants in the world. But, if it was Death Cab, I think we'd have to do it in Seattle, and if we did it in Seattle, it’d be in Musang, an amazing Filipino restaurant (getting full circle here) where we hosted our Shannon Lay dinner party a couple years ago. I also feel like maybe a Bruce Springsteen dinner party on the Jersey Shore in Asbury would be pretty magical. I feel like he’d really enjoy it.
LHD: I love Cautious Clay, so I'd love to do a party with him. And he's such a talented, multi-instrument musician I’d be interested to see how he’d interpret that in a smaller space, especially as he has done a lot of string versions of his songs. But I feel like we do less music that can be loud, so I’d love to find a way to do a punk show! I don't know how that would work because it could be counter-intuitive, but I would love to figure it out at some point.
SDP: Thanks, guys. Thanks for talking to The Dishing and sharing your upcoming events. We can’t wait to see more.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.