A Very Special Family Meal at Angie Mar’s Le B

Moments of joy amidst a gathering storm

It’s Chinese New Year, Gung hay fat choy, bitches. I’m hanging out with the kids because, for the first time, CNY is an official DOE holiday. Nothing dampens parental enthusiasm for a holiday like making it a day off from school.

Earlier on Tuesday I got to spend some time with Angie Mar as she prepared a lunar new year meal for her staff at Le B. The entire team — kitchen and dining room staff — had spent Saturday making pork-and-crab and chicken-and-truffle dumplings. Now the dumplings sat on sheet trays, in shapes as wildly varied as those who made them. Those that looked like tortelli were Mar’s. “I can not do pleated dumplings,” she admitted, “I’ve always been bad at them since I’m was a little girl.” Mar had also ordered a whole black bass and was busy stuffing it with strands of ginger. It would be steamed in soy sauce. “It’s my father’s recipe,” she said. Fish, eaten head and tail whole, is a standby on the CNY table (and, for that matter, on the Rosh Hashanah table too.) There was five spice duck, a hefty T-bone steak and a bowl of oranges artfully arranged. Edward, the chef de partie for the poissonier, had prepared tteokguk, a traditional Korean soup for the new year. “Eat this,” he said, “and you’ll live for another year.”

The mood was low-key festive. No one whooped; It was after all still a fine dining kitchen. But even staff on their day off came to partake in the festivities. It’s a small kitchen, compact and focused. Even as the feast was being prepared, the sous and saucier were busy preparing the restaurant week menu as well as their mise for dinner. A long sheet of pasta dough was being formed into veal brain ravioli. One man was devoted to stamping 45-day aged angus into perfect circles for the restaurant’s off-menu burger. Mar herself was fielding phone calls from Las Vegas, where she would be throwing her own Chinese New Year party on Sunday at the Wynn.

No one mentioned it but I did feel a pall had fallen over the gleaming stainless steel and quiet focus of the kitchen. At Trump’s direction, ICE had been conducting raids across the country, putting into action his promise of mass deportations. Fear has been, appropriately, spreading through immigrant communities across the country. As has been true for all of his tantrumic policies, there seems to be little in the way of due process or forethought. Just that morning, proud puppy executioner Kristi Noem had tagged along for an ICE raid in Queens. Last week, ICE agents had raided a seafood depot in Newark. And tucked into the schadenfruede-y“The Tin Building is a $200 Million Dollar Food-Hall Flop” story, is the fact that Seaport Development Holdings, the company that runs the Tin Building, summarily fired 100 undocumented workers. Cost-cutting or quisling capitulation to fascism or both?

I couldn’t — and can’t — help but marvel (in like, a bad way) at how silent so many food people have been on the issue. Part of it, as Mar pointed out, is it is hard for a chef to say anything lest they expose themselves and their staff to unwanted attention. “You just put a huge target on your back when you speak up” she says. I get that. Plenty of chefs and restaurateurs are doing their best to protect their staff, taking free webinars from law firms like Helbraun Levey on guidance and preparation for ICE raids among other actions.

But what about the rest of us? I, for instance, make my living writing about restaurants, restaurants are staffed, by and large, with immigrants. Some are legal; some are undocumented. According to a recent estimate by the Center for Migration Studies, among the 470,100 undocumented workers in New York State are 16,800 cooks, 9,200 waiters, 9,100 food prep workers, and 7,000 chefs. Anyone who even tangentially involved in the restaurant industry knows this to be true. It’s not a secret. It is how the industry works.

And what about New Yorkers at large, or at least that subsect of New Yorkers who treat restaurants as one of the great art forms along with the Met, the other Met, the Mets, RHONY and whatever Julia Fox is up to? (These are, btw, my people.) Separate and apart from the fact that these undocumented workers aren’t really “undocumented workers” at all but shorn of their capitalistic designation as labor really “undocumented people” and really, if we undo the fiction of nation-states, just people, and therefore deserving of our empathy and care. Separate and apart from all of that, don’t we as foodies owe it to those upon whom our pleasure relies to stand up for them?

Sure, the whole goddamn apparatus of restaurants — not to mention construction, home healthcare, childcare, the entire Imperial Mode of Living — is built on the exploitation of the periphery and those we deem peripherals. But even so, especially so, when masked men barge into our restaurants, we as diners have a special obligation to do something. Or does our love of restaurants stop only at the plate?

I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know what ther fuck to do about any of this. The first step is yapping. (Yapping, by the way, on Substack is much preferable to yapping on Instagram for two reasons. One, it is less performative. Two, the platform isn’t owned by a boxy-shirt-wearing Cuban-link-sporting fuckbro.) I guess money is one thing I can give. It’s not like I have a ton of it but I have enough to give. As imperfect as the action is, I donated to the Immigrant Defense Project, which offers legal advice and training, litigation and advocacy on behalf of immigrants. Time is another. On February 10th, I am attending Acompañamientos training held by the Envision Freedom Fund, a program which trains volunteers to accompany asylum seekers and those facing deportation to their immigration hearings. I am sure there are many other opportunities but those are the ones I could find and an imperfect start is better than no start at all.

Generally speaking I find the conflation of the corporate world with family life deeply deleterious. I don’t want a work-wife. I don’t want team-building exercises. Fuck your vision board, your kickball and your retreats. My family is my family. My coworkers are my colleagues. But a family meal at a restaurant feels different. Apart from singing and dancing with someone, there’s little more intimate that cooking beside them. Except, perhaps, for eating. So eating with those with whom you cook does feel intensely intimate.

As we gathered at the long table at Le B, chefs de partie, commis, poissonier, saucier, entremetier, porters, waiters, managers, hosts ate their dumplings and drank water out of 1/2 quart containers. (Cooks hate glasses.) It felt like a family, not an idealized or melodramatic one. Phones were out. Silence pervaded. Cliques had naturally formed. But it was a family nonetheless. Even if we as diners don’t often get to sit at the table during family meal, we’re part of that family too. And we owe it to our brothers and sisters to protect them however we can in this year and the next and the one after that too.