Tuesday, August 31, 2021

One Day—and One Night—in the Kitchen at Les Halles

 

They're professionals at this in Russia, so no matter how many Jell-O shots or Jager shooters you might have downed at college mixers, no matter how good a drinker you might think you are, don't forget that the Russians - any Russian - can drink you under the table.
~ Anthony Bourdain, 



It’s been 23 years since restaurateur Philippe Lajaunie met Anthony Bourdain, the chef who led the kitchen at his New York City restaurant, Les Halles, before becoming a beloved global phenomenon with his many television series and books exploring the world. It’s been five years since Les Halles closed its doors on Park Avenue. And it’s been three years since Bourdain left us. 

Bourdain calling in orders for produce. Lajaunie says Bourdain loved to work on special off-the-menu dishes. sourcing special ingredients for them. // Photo Courtesy Dmitri Kasterine / Focus Features

This week, Lajaunie finds himself back in New York, inside the kitchen where he and Bourdain once served steak frites and bowls of steaming hot French onion soup to hundreds of diners a day. He’s here to oversee a series of pop-up dinners, commemorating the life of the restaurant’s former executive chef and also, his friend, in conjunction with the release of a new documentary about Bourdain’s life, “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain.”   

We had the opportunity to speak with Lajaunie about his memories of Bourdain, and of Les Halles. Here’s what he had to say. 



In one of Anthony Bourdain’s first essays for the magazine, he chronicles a shift at Les Halles, where he worked as the head chef


One Day—and One Night—in the Kitchen at Les Halles

From 2000: For weekenders at the restaurant on Park Avenue South where I work as the chef, a saddle of wild hare stuffed with foie gras is not a good special.

The author with some of his staff at Les Halles.Photographs by Martin Schoeller for The New Yorker

On Friday morning, I wake up at five-fifty-five. While I brush my teeth, and take my first aspirins of the day, I’m thinking about weekend specials. The grill station will be too busy for elaborate presentations, so I need things that are quick, simple, and easily plated. The people who will be coming tonight and tomorrow night to Les Halles, a restaurant on Park Avenue South where I work as the chef, aren’t like the people who come during the week. For the weekenders, a saddle of wild hare stuffed with foie gras is not a good special. Nor is any kind of fish with an exotic name.

Climbing into a taxi on Broadway, I decide that the fish special will be grilled tuna livornaise with roasted potatoes and grilled asparagus. It’s a layup. My overworked grill man can heat the already cooked spuds and the blanched asparagus on a sizzle platter; the tuna will get a quick walk across the grill; and all he’ll have to do is heat up the sauce at the last minute. For the appetizer special, I’m thinking cockles steamed with chorizo, leeks, tomatoes, and white wine—a one-pan wonder. The meat special is more problematic. The tuna will be taking up most of the grill’s time, so the meat will have to be prepared at the sauté station. Not easy. Les Halles features classic French bistro food, and at any one time the sauté station has to be ready to turn out moules à la marinièreboudin noirwith caramelized apples, filet au poivre, steak au poivre, steak tartare, calf’s liver persillé, cassoulet Toulousain, magret de moulard with quince and sauce miel, the ridiculously popular mignon of pork, pieds de cochon, and a navarin of lamb that comes with baby carrots, pearl onions, niçoise olives, garlic confit, tomato concassée, fava beans, and chopped fresh herbs. But I’ve got a leg of venison and twelve pheasants coming in. I decide on the pheasant. I can par-roast it ahead of time, so that all my sous-chef will have to do is take it off the bone and sling it into the oven to finish, then heat up the sauce and the garnishes before serving.

As usual when I arrive, Jaimé, the night porter, has his boom box blasting salsa from behind the bar. I check the reservation book—eighty for tonight. I flip through the manager’s log—the notebook in which the night guy tells the day guy about customer complaints, repair requirements, employee misbehavior, and important phone calls. I learn that last night my grill man called one of the waiters a cocksucker and pounded his fist on his cutting board in a “menacing way” when five diners came into the restaurant at three minutes before the midnight closing hour and ordered five côtes de bœuf, medium-well (cooking time: forty-five minutes). Jaimé grins at me from the stairs. He’s covered with grime as a result of hauling hundreds of pounds of garbage out onto the street.

Unknown Parts of the Kitchen: An AI Bourdain Speaks From the Grave


Malchkeoun read the  Kitchen Confidential   


Some of the insightful chapters Finishing Up: "Kitchen Confidential"  And quotes 




15 Anthony Bourdain Quotes

1. You learn a lot about someone when you share a meal together.

2. I’m not afraid to look like an idiot.

3. Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one’s life.

4. I, personally, think there is a really danger of taking food too seriously. Food should be part of the bigger picture.

5. I’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

6. If somebody crafts an interesting tweet that’ll lead me to their blog, I’m going to their blog.

   7. Sometimes the greatest meals on vacations are the ones you find when Plan A falls through.

8. The celebrity-chef thing, even at its worst, its most annoying, its silliest, its goofiest, its most egregious and cynical, has been a good thing.

9. People are generally proud of their food. A willingness to eat and drink with people without fear and prejudice… they open up to you in ways that somebody visiting who is driven by a story may not get.

10. I think that if all kids aspire to reach a point where they could feed themselves and a few of their friends, this would be good for the world surely.

11. I always entertain the notion that I’m wrong, or that I’ll have to revise my opinion. Most of the time that feels good; sometimes it really hurts and is embarrassing.

12. I would like to see people more aware of where their food comes from. I would like to see small farmers empowered. I feed my daughter almost exclusively organic food.

13. I don’t have to agree with you to like you or respect you.

14. If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them – wherever you go.

15. Skills can be taught. Character you either have or you don’t have.




Keep your kids away from relying on takeout while giving them a lesson on delicious meals they can make themselves


Google Cloud - Now that machines can learn, can they unlearn?

 

Lake Tahoe Suffocates With Smoke New York Times. A wake up call that the squillionaires that hang there are guaranteed to ignore.




SCIENCE!  Previous Covid Prevents Delta Infection Better Than Pfizer Shot.

People who recovered from a bout of Covid-19 during one of the earlier waves of the pandemic appear to have a lower risk of contracting the delta variant than those who got two doses of the vaccine from Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE.


Pew: “Americans have long debated the boundaries of free speech, from what is and isn’t protected by the First Amendment to discussions about “political correctness” and, more recently, “cancel culture.” The internet has amplified these debates and fostered new questions about tone and tenor in recent years. Here’s a look at how adults in the United States see these and related issues, based on Pew Research Center surveys…”


I Studied People Who Think Leisure Is a Waste of Time – Here’s What I Found


Michael Pascoe: What happens next isn’t ‘freedom’ – it’s triage The New Daily. Australia. All it takes is one defector, and everybody in the defector’s network is “living with it.”



Why Do Some People Weather Coronavirus Infection Unscathed? Undark


The Origins of SARS-CoV-2: A Critical Review


GPs and hospitals to limit blood tests in England due to bottle shortage Guardian


First, surges in Covid-19 infections led to shortages of hospital beds and staff. Now it’s oxygen CNN 


Fatal overdoses from illicit tranquilizers jumped 6-fold during pandemic.



Stories on clip above: US Marines officer relieved of duties after video seeking ‘accountability’ over Afghanistan Guardian and Active duty Marine battalion commander is relieved of duties after posting furious video rant hammering senior leaders for not admitting ‘we messed this up’ Daily Mail (Alison L)

US Troops caught up in ISIL-K – Taliban Civil War: Why it Proves Biden was Right to LeaveJuan Cole (resilc)

Taliban forces in Kabul airport ready to take over -Taliban officials Reuters

Who profits from the Kabul suicide bombing? Asia Times 

Like Ordering Pizza London Review of Books (Anthony L)

Leon Panetta says US troops will need to go back to Afghanistan New York Po


Want a Successful Cloud Migration? First, Change Your Mindset


Intro to Google Cloud VMware Engine: Establishing an SDDC in Google Cloud



Ars Technica – Researchers see if they can remove sensitive data without retraining AI from scratch: “Companies of all kinds use machine learning to analyze people’s desires, dislikes, or faces. Some researchers are now asking a different question: How can we make machines forget? A nascent area of computer science dubbed machine unlearning seeks ways to induce selective amnesia in artificial intelligence software. The goal is to remove all trace of a particular person or data point from a machine-learning system, without affecting its performance. If made practical, the concept could give people more control over their data and the value derived from it. Although users can already ask some companies to delete personal data, they are generally in the dark about what algorithms their information helped tune or train. Machine unlearning could make it possible for a person to withdraw both their data and a company’s ability to profit from it. Although intuitive to anyone who has rued what they shared online, that notion of artificial amnesia requires some new ideas in computer science. Companies spend millions of dollars training machine-learning algorithms to recognize faces or rank social posts, because the algorithms often can solve a problem more quickly than human coders alone. But once trained, a machine-learning system is not easily altered, or even understood. The conventional way to remove the influence of a particular data point is to rebuild a system from the beginning, a potentially costly exercise. “This research aims to find some middle ground,” says Aaron Roth, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who is working on machine unlearning. “Can we remove all influence of someone’s data when they ask to delete it, but avoid the full cost of retraining from scratch?”..”


Google’s “About This Result” Panel Offers Insight into your Search Results

Wisblawg: “Have you ever been puzzled by the results from a Google search?  Found yourself wondering how Google connected those results to the words you typed, especially if you didn’t get exactly what you were expecting to find?  Fortunately, the newly enhanced About This Result paneloffers some contextual insight into your search results. To view the About this Result panel, click on the three dots next to most Google search results as shown below. This will open a new panel that provides information about the source website, a list of your search terms that appear in the results, and any related terms that Google added to your search. Note that in the example below, I searched for “sources of tribal law.” Google automatically added in “Native American, court, and legal” as related terms. In this instance, that was a pretty helpful addition…”


The Secret Bias Hidden in Mortgage-Approval Algorithms

The MarkUp: “Nationally, loan applicants of color were 40%–80% more likely to be denied than their White counterparts In certain metro areas, the disparity was greater than 250%… An investigation by The Markup has found that lenders in 2019 were more likely to deny home loans to people of color than to White people with similar financial characteristics—even when we controlled for newly available financial factors that the mortgage industry for years has said would explain racial disparities in lending. Holding 17 different factors steady in a complex statistical analysis of more than two million conventional mortgage applications for home purchases, we found that lenders were 40 percent more likely to turn down Latino applicants for loans, 50 percent more likely to deny Asian/Pacific Islander applicants, and 70 percent more likely to deny Native American applicants than similar White applicants. Lenders were 80 percent more likely to reject Black applicants than similar White applicants. These are national rates. In every case, the prospective borrowers of color looked almost exactly the same on paper as the White applicants, except for their race…”




Get Shots or Get Out, U.S. Employers Are Telling Workers Bloomberg. I guess we have “corporate health” now, not public health. So it goes.

The Corporate Deterrent To More VaccinationsDaily Poster. No paid time off. Naturally. The people permitted to change social relations in the workplace are non-essential workers who can work from home. Period. Everybody else at a minumum needs a union, and maybe that’s not enough.

O Canada! Claudia Sahm, Stay-At-Home Macr

 

U.S. Billionaires Got 62 percent Richer During Pandemic. They’re Now Up $1.8

 

Trillion.Institute for Policy Studies. Capitalism seems to be anti-fragile.

 

COVID-19: A Catalyst for Rising Inequality in Thailand The Diplomat

 

What Made the Battle of Blair Mountain the Largest Labor Uprising in American HistorySmithsonian



Wuhan lab leak theory: How Fort Detrick became a centre for Chinese conspiracies

 

You’re never as good as everyone tells you when you win, and you’re never as bad as they say when you lose.”

 

 – Lou Holtz 


 

China CDC Weekly: The new coronavirus can spread through aerosols in the “handshake building” What China Reads



Racked With Guilt, Some COVID-19 Survivors Are Asking, 'Why Me?' 


The Drowned and the Unsaved

He survived, of course.

But also he was drowned.

He was about to blame himself for the darkness
for the rest of his life.

Truth on the reality of the exile slowly seeps through ...

Indeed, why your displaced dreams ache to go home, Jozef.

Far better to strip the reality naked and force it out into the open
where the whole world can ponder at the irony of a life about
nothing.

One Man Survives the Iron Curtain Crossing



Niccolò Machiavelli taught that politics is an alien universe, unstable and inconsistent – dominated by chance – in which appearance, not reality, defines success. It does not matter who politicians really are. What matters is how people perceive them. Because public opinion is fickle, politics a gamble and the political universe unstable, successful leaders need minds that change with “fortune and changing circumstances”. And because “people are ungrateful, fickle, feigners and dissemblers”, the politician must necessarily also be a “great feigner and dissembler”. Dishonesty – and indeed any other immoral conduct – is justified, for Machiavelli, provided that it leads to dominion over a powerful state. The end justifies the means (“accusandolo il fatto, lo effetto lo scusi”). 

When the flawed succeed: Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and the corrosion of morals Times Literary Supplement


Theoretically, this douchebag is a medical authority (one wonders about that). His  opinion regarding social media is just that. He might want to take a refresher course on the First Amendment — and maybe a course in American history. And maybe even go to some totalitarian place he would find  more congenial. He should also be fired.

I mean, what the hell qualifies this guy to make a sociopolitical judgment regarding free speech? Free speech means the right to shoot your mouth off  even if you’re wrong. This clown has no trouble exercising it. He just doesn’t want anybody who he doesn’t agree with to exercise it.


 We know this happens every day, but it doesn’t lessen the obligation to bring sunshine to all of it.


Recovering the Wonder of Flight: “Little Prince” Author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on Finding the Miraculous in the Mechanical

“In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.”



Depression is why I’m writing this. Shame is why I’m writing it under a pseudonym

Dr Nolan Zane: ‘You maintain face by carrying out the roles ascribed to you by one culture and one society.’

My Asian parents, like many, did not understand my depression or anxiety. Today, talking about how it affected me openly is still treacherous terrain



Wuhan lab leak theory: How Fort Detrick became a centre for Chinese conspiraciesBBC. As we’ve said repeatedly, China has made a huge domestic push to depict the US as the source of SARS-Cov-2. So any China origin, be it zoonotic or lab leak, is very damaging politically. Hence the refusal to cooperate in investigations. 


First US COVID Deaths Came Earlier Than Previously Thought Mercury News