Harvey McWilliams hated a particular brand of storebought potato salad.

An exacting gourmand who ran the beloved takeaway spot Mainly Pasta for 16 years, McWilliams would often ask guests to bring specific dishes he liked to accompany his mains, pastas and soups for dinner parties he hosted.

One evening, friend Terri Treinen brought over a heavily doctored version of the storebought potato salad that McWilliams purportedly loathed. Believing it was homemade, McWilliams loved it. Treinen could never bring herself to tell him the truth.

Payback came when McWilliams married his longtime partner Kenneth Coleman.

“I had to make potato salad for their wedding,” Treinen says. “You can imagine how much money I spent.”

The doctored potato salad is one of many recipes found in the new cookbook “Mainly Harvey,” a celebration of the award-winning and prolific printmaker, painter, interior designer, art curator, and furniture designer by six of his friends. McWilliams died in 2021 after a long illness at the age of 88.

Dinners hosted at McWilliams and Coleman’s home on West Main Street were the highlight of many a social calendar.

“You always felt completely welcomed,” says Sarah Rowland, a graphic designer who became friends with McWilliams through her brother Bruce, owner of Rowland restaurant. “Inevitably there would be a piano concert at the end of the night, and you’d be sitting in this living room of incredible chairs listening to incredible music live from Ken and then from Harvey. You felt chosen. You felt like this was something out of the ’30s. It just felt so old world and modern and jazzy and artistic. You just felt like you were somebody to be there.”

McWilliams was a feisty, inspiring presence for multiple generations of Richmond’s creative class. His long career included designing the original interior of St. Mary’s Hospital, curating exhibits for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ traveling artmobile, serving as a graphic designer for the Virginia State Library, building the bar of the Firehouse Theatre, creating bold, abstract prints, and designing furniture. His “Harvey” chairs were sold for a time at the VMFA.

In 2020, McWilliams published “The Windshield Poems,” a collection of romantic and erotic poetry that a secret admirer had left on his windshield over the course of 16 years. A staged reading of the poems was held at the Firehouse the same year.

As boundless as McWilliams’ creative energies were, he wouldn’t commit to crafting a cookbook while he was alive.

“We never could get him to get involved on it,” says friend David Cheatham. “After his passing, several of us were talking and decided it might be good to resurrect that, so we started gathering recipes.”

One Sunday a month over the course of a year and a half, Beth and David Cheatham, Charley King, Sarah Rowland, former Style contributor Edwin Slipek and Treinen met to work on the cookbook. The book features recipes from McWilliams and friends paired with photographs of McWilliams’ bold, modern prints and Coleman’s glass art; Coleman died in 2017.

“It’s half a cookbook and half a showing of his prints and Ken’s glassware,” David Cheatham says. “It was a labor of love that the six of us got together and were able to make happen.”

The name for the book was inspired by McWilliams’ former eatery, which opened in 1983 at 2227 W. Main Street and served as the city’s first gourmet takeaway spot. Though renowned for his pasta, McWilliams’ desserts deserve just as much fanfare. According to McWilliams, his desserts won so many blue ribbons at the State Fair that he was eventually banned from competing.

Some standout recipes include turkey tetrazzini, veggie lasagna, red pepper and mango soup, crab cakes with an Asian vinaigrette, carrot soup and red velvet cake. Playing off the initials KFC, there’s also Ken’s F–king Chicken, a baked chicken dish. Coleman and McWilliams referred to exceptionally large chicken breasts as “Mae Wests.”

“[Food] was his love language,” says Treinen. “He was a really creative person, a really good artist, but [food was] the way you knew he loved you.”

As he often whipped up pasta dishes from memory, some of McWilliams’ best recipes aren’t found in the cookbook. There’s also no recipe for his beloved tiramisu.

The cookbook’s initial pressing of 100 was pre-sold, but an additional run is possible if there’s enough interest.

“It took us a year and a half, and it was definitely a six-person project because it was a royal pain in the ass, just like Harvey,” says Sarah Rowland, who designed the cookbook. “We’d always laugh: ‘Of course this is difficult, ‘cause it’s Harvey.’”

Not long before McWilliams died in 2021, he encountered some distinctive yellow tube-shaped traffic cones after having dinner downtown with Sarah and Bruce Rowland. McWilliams wanted one.

“He was obsessed, and he was determined to steal one of these things,” says Sarah Rowland.

Bruce was able to talk McWilliams out of committing petty theft, but the next time Sarah visited McWilliams’ house he had the same style of cones decorating his front yard; he’d bought them online.

“That was Harvey,” Sarah Rowland says. “He was impulsive and creative and always alive, always vibrant and on the verge of being ridiculous, but not. He just was such a big, bold, beautiful person.”

To inquire about future pressings of the cookbook, contact Terri Treinen: territreinen@gmail.com.