susan at LivingMacTavish dot com

Susan has hosted cocktail parties, all-day brunches, impromptu dinners, barbeques for hoards and other spirited gatherings over food, drink and conversation since she moved into her first apartment, a cramped one-bedroom railroad dwelling in San Francisco. Years later, she continues to bring people together a few times a week to share a meal and stories.

Susan was born on Prince Edward Island off of the Atlantic Coast of Canada. Her childhood was spent between sleep-away school in Scotland and summers in Connecticut.  There she experimented her way through her mother’s collection of food magazines from the Sixties and Seventies. She was given an early appreciation for enterprise and aesthetics: when she was five, Susan bid on her first piece of art at auction (an unknown Dutch artist, the painting still securing prime real estate on her wall) because she liked the big, orange square in the middle of the painting.

Susan landed in San Francisco a week after college graduation and as the Internet was beginning to explode.  Out of her tiny apartment crammed with antiques, art, and mid-century furniture passed down to her from prior generations, she started Posthoc, an irreverent guide to San Francisco with over 100 volunteers. The Posthoc writers gathered frequently in her apartment where they were fed copious amounts of food and drink whilst striking up business deals amongst themselves. During this time, Susan also founded Best Public Relations, a PR firm where that took little known companies and turned them into household names. Susan has spent many years working with the startup community, and has been an active advisor to scads of entrepreneurs over the years. 

A typical week at Susan’s might include a gathering of gaming industry insiders from around the world, a book launch for a Pulitzer prize-winning author, a house concert for a rocker, or a last-minute dinner for a few friends in front of the fireplace. She’s known for spending Saturday mornings mixing up elixirs made from a plethora of fresh ingredients such as roasted beets with cayenne pepper (fantastic with icy chipotle vodka), and freshly squeezed juices mixed with herbs from her garden. 

Entertaining, design, fashion, food, and drink are Susan’s trade and gift, and she will show you how to do everything with flair, intimacy and hilarity. For her, perfection is undesirable and unobtainable, and the organized chaos of daily life the norm to navigate. But one constant throughout her life has been the belief that bringing people together in person to enjoy a meal, to relish music, and to swap stories, converse and debate is one of the most vital ways to enjoy life, friends and family. 

Today, Susan splits her time between San Francisco and New York City.