Rebecca Miller Ffrench, founder and proprietor of Upstate Table in Kingston, didn’t start out intending to become a mover and shaker in the world of gourmet cuisine. Although she always enjoyed cooking, the Milwaukee native says, her initial intent was to become a journalist. She started college in Texas, but felt out-of-place there and ended up moving to Norway, getting a baccalaureate in Art History from the University of Bergen.
“My first job out of college was at Town and Country magazine, as a fact-checker,” she relates. “That led to work at Fodor’s, first as an editorial assistant, then as an editor.” Working on travel guides led her to discover the Catskills, where she met her husband-to-be Jim Ffrench (the unusual spelling comes from his family’s Welsh origins) on a ski trip. They married, bought a weekend house in Phoenicia in 1999 and started a family, splitting their professional lives between there and New York City.
The Fodor’s gig also launched a fascination with “the intersection of food and travel,” she says. It led to work for Condé Nast Traveler and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, where “Food became more and more a part of what I was doing.” She was learning to stage photo shoots of beautiful dinner tables, but also got involved with recipe development. She furthered her formal education studying culinary nutrition at the Natural Gourmet Institute in Manhattan, which was later absorbed by the Institute for Culinary Education. Creating beautiful, healthy food and presenting it were parallel professional streams that soon merged.
In 2005, she got in on the ground floor of a Condé Nast startup called Cookie magazine, focused on entertaining for and with kids. Her specialty there became party-planning. Organizing events inspired a project to write a “party book,” which evolved into Sweet Home: Over 100 Heritage Desserts and Ideas for Preserving Family Recipes (Kyle Books, 2012) after she came into possession of an aunt’s food journal. It was the first of many cookbooks she would come to write, either alone or as co-author or even ghostwriter. “Right now, I’m co-writing a cookbook for a 20-year-old TikToker,” Ffrench reports. “I love her; she’s adorable.” Her most recent solo volume is The Complete Vegan (Clarkson Potter, 2019).
As a prolific author on food and lifestyles, Ffrench has been invited to teach at cooking schools, participate in chef competitions and appear on national television shows, including Good Morning America and NBC’s Emmy-winning Naturally Danny Seo. She has styled party tables and segments for the Today Show and Kelly and Michael Live!
But the more self-sufficient, community-rooted lifestyle she found in the Catskills suits Ffrench’s down-to-Earth personality better than the company of celebrity chefs. Her ambition became to establish a “culinary lifestyle studio” closer to home that could serve deep-pocketed corporate clients and regular upstate folks alike. “I love the cookbook-writing process so much: the longer format, the recipe development. But I had nobody to share it with.” So, she began to organize pop-up food events, and soon homed in on Kingston as the logical place to establish a more permanent business base.
It was in 2016 that Upstate Table first came into being, housed at the Ulster County Community Action Center in the Ponckhockie neighborhood. The building had a lot of problems, however: “The floor actually fell in, and it was closed for awhile,” she recounts. So, she began looking at potential alternative sites. She considered a storefront in Midtown, across from Kingston High School, but “The landlord wanted it to be open for retail six days a week. He wanted it to be a public space.” That wasn’t quite what Ffrench had in mind.
She credits realtor Sean Nutley with putting her in touch with architect Scott Dutton, who was then gutting a former shirt factory next door to the YMCA, the Fuller Building, and transforming it into a sort of incubator for creative entrepreneurs. “Scott showed me this building in 2018. There was a lot of work left to be done, but I saw the space and thought, ‘Oh my God, that light!’”
The restoration project took longer than planned, and by the time the space was ready, in October 2020, the pandemic was in full swing. That bought Ffrench plenty of time to shape Upstate Table into the kind of space she wanted, furnishing it with salvaged, repurposed cabinetry, tables and chairs that perfectly complement the exposed brick walls, roughhewn wooden beams, 14-foot factory ceilings and overall post-industrial vibe. “That light” spills in from partially ivy-covered, six-foot-tall divided-light windows, illuminating an area where long tables are lined up, ready to host photo shoots of beautiful food prepared in the adjoining large commercial kitchen.
What goes on in this space? Four primary types of business activity: First, there’s a “cakery,” in which Ffrench and her crew bake multiple gorgeous cakes for weddings and special events. Their specialty at present is what she calls “naked cakes” with minimal frosting, their layers exposed to the eye like a parfait. Another option is cakes whose tops and sides are elegantly adorned with pressed flowers.
Then there’s the studio piece. Various creative collaborators rent the space to lay out food and table settings for high-end photography in magazine spreads, cookbooks and the like. “Danny Seo shoots here,” Ffrench notes.
Upstate Table is also an events space, hosting birthday parties, showers, receptions, corporate events, holiday parties and so on. It’s especially popular for food-related book launches by the like of Maya Kaimal, Anna Stockwell and Chitra Agarwal, according to Ffrench. All the furniture is designed to be movable, so the 750-square-foot studio can accommodate sit-down dinners for up to 38 people, buffets for up to 60 and standing cocktail parties for 100 or more. She also caters and helps organize pop-up events offsite, such as Field + Supply’s seasonal markets at the Hutton Brickyards.
Finally, Upstate Table hosts cooking workshops, although not currently on a regular schedule. Past classes have included gingerbread housebuilding, bread-baking, cake-decorating, a dumpling workshop and pasta-making. Ffrench shows us photos of extraordinary sheets of “laminated” pasta with beautiful patterns of herbs pressed into them. This is true culinary art!
“My favorite thing is getting to work with the Y kids. I just love them,” Ffrench says, referring to the Cooking Crew component of the youth internships at the YMCA Farm Project. The expansive urban gardens are tucked right behind the Fuller Building, out of sight of Broadway a mere half-block away, and in season provide an endless supply of fresh herbs, flowers, vegetables and berries for Upstate Table’s work. “They cook here once a week. During COVID they were cooking for People’s Place.” Ffrench did the event planning for the Strolling Soirée gala that marked the Farm Project’s tenth anniversary on the Summer Solstice.
Barter arrangements with urban youth learning organic gardening and collaborations with other arts entrepreneurs are the sorts of activities that make Ffrench feel most like she has found her niche here in Kingston. She has worked with some of the other businesses based in the Fuller Building to organize popups in the lobby and other shared spaces. Soon to come, she’s hoping, are package deals where customers will be able to spend a day there enjoying cooking, ceramics and photography workshops, beauty treatments and styling sessions. “It’s a little bit scrappy, but it works. It’s a very flexible space,” she says. “There are so many creatives in this area. I feel so lucky to be here.”
To keep tabs on what workshops are being planned, sign up for one or arrange to teach one yourself, the website at www.theupstatetable.com is the place to look. That’s also the best place to contact Ffrench if you want to try samples of her cakes or other culinary specialties for an event you’re planning.
Join the family! 
