Profile | From fried chicken with caviar to Le Burger, chef Angie Mar on making food she believes in

Angie Mar was eight years old when she ate “the dish that really changed my life”. Now in her forties, the Chinese-American chef still vividly remembers the bowl of rognons de veau (veal kidneys) cooked in cognac and cream that she had on her first visit to France. “It opened me up to this cuisine that I’d never had before,” Mar recalls, crediting her parents for broadening her palate. While she grew up around food, Mar did not initially intend to go into hospitality. But in 2010 she was feeling unfulfilled after working for a decade in corporate real estate in Los Angeles. So she moved to New York and enrolled in the French Culinary Institute. Upon graduating a year later she worked under chef April Bloomfield at the Spotted Pig, a gastropub in Manhattan’s West Village, where, Mar says, she learned about cooking with structure, precision and consistency – lessons she continues to draw on. In 2013 Mar became the executive chef of The Beatrice Inn, a long-standing steakhouse that was then owned by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter. “It had just gotten a horrible review in The [New York] Times, so I didn’t really want the restaurant. But a very dear friend of mine said, ‘You should take over the restaurant, because if you take over the kitchen there, no one’s gonna be paying attention to it, because it just got a terrible review. So you can make your mistakes while no one’s paying attention,’” she remembers. Mar quietly revamped it and, after she and her cousin bought the restaurant three years later, Pete Wells, food critic for The New York Times, awarded The Beatrice Inn two stars and praised Mar’s vision for the restaurant. I’m very much cooking the food that I believe in Angie Mar When the restaurant turned 100 in 2020, Mar closed it to open the ultra luxurious Les Trois Chevaux a year later. It ran for about two years, before she decided to close it and turn the space into the more playful Le B. Le B quickly established a reputation for its Lunar New Year parties, which featured lion dances and drew celebrities including domestic diva Martha Stewart and fashion designers Dianne Brill and Peter Som and where Mar, in her designer dresses, was known as the hostess with the mostest. This year the party was transplanted from New York to supper club Delilah at Wynn Las Vegas. On the menu were dishes such as heritage pork and truffle dumplings, Dungeness crab and pork dumplings, white truffle edamame har gao, and citrus pavlova with oolong blossom cream. Those still hungry after dinner were served a miniature version of her signature “Le Burger” – a patty of ground 45-day-aged rib-eye with red wine caramelised onions and melted Fromager d’Affinois cheese in a brioche bun. Mar wore a Carolina Herrera dress and an Elsa Peretti scorpion necklace for the night. The guests included influencers like Jessica Wang, Christine Chiu, fashion designer Bach Mai and Congresswoman Susie Lee, a Nevada Democrat. Her annual Lunar New Year party is an opportunity for people in the hospitality industry to get together after Christmas and New Year, and for Mar to celebrate her Chinese heritage, she says. “It started out with just a very simple family meal with the team that works for us. We all sat around a table, drank tea and folded dumplings and had this beautiful family meal,” she says. “And then over the years, it really progressed to me wanting to share a bit of my culture and the way we celebrate with my guests, with my friends, our regulars, with our patrons.” For all her initial reluctance to enter the industry, hospitality is in Mar’s blood. The third-generation Chinese-American was born and raised in Seattle in the US northwest with her two younger brothers and numerous cousins – her father had 10 siblings. I’ve been obsessed with food since I was a kid, and for me, there’s never anything that I won’t try Angie Mar One of them was Mar’s late aunt Ruby Chow, who opened Ruby Chow’s, the first Chinese restaurant outside the city’s Chinatown, where a young Bruce Lee once washed dishes. While the restaurant mostly served Chinese food, Mar says there were also American dishes on the menu. “This is one of the reasons why we do fried chicken [with caviar] at Lunar New Year. [My aunt] always had a whole fried chicken on the American side of her menu. She describes Chow as terrifying and amazing, and says she taught her generation of the family to be decisive, fearless and professional, yet also hospitable. “I think that very much translates from who she was as a person to how she ran her restaurant too, instilling that within myself and her kids and all my cousins. It has very much translated into how I run my restaurant today,” she adds. Of her own approach today, Mar says: “I’m not cooking for critics. I’m not cooking to please the general public and have something for everybody. “I’m very much cooking the food that I believe in, and I think that it’s a really great time right now, because you can taste that in the food. My cuisine is not for everybody.” She draws from numerous influences, including flavours from her childhood and things she has picked up in her travels in Asia, including Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan. “I use jasmine tea for the Chinese method of smoking duck, but it is executed in a very French way. And we might use yuzu, or cherry blossoms from Japan, in a very French way. So the cuisine that I’m cooking I feel is very unique, because it is very specific to how I grew up.” While Beatrice Inn was a famous chophouse and Mar is known for Le Burger, which she describes as “the Birkin of burgers” in a reference to the highly sought-after Hermes handbag, meat is not what she likes to eat most. “I got so much press for always cooking meat,” she says. “But my personal view as a chef is that anybody can cook a steak; it’s not rocket science. I’m actually far better at birds and fish, and it’s actually what we focus on at restaurant Le B.” Despite her success cooking the food she believes in, with its international flavours, Mar does have one regret. “I really wish that I had learned to cook Chinese food. The funny part is that I love to eat Chinese food, specifically Taiwanese food,” she says. “I’ve been obsessed with food since I was a kid, and for me, there’s never anything that I won’t try. I love Italian food too, and I make excellent pasta, but I could not make a lot of regional Italian cuisine, just like I can’t really cook Chinese food, but it’s my favourite thing to eat.”

Profile | From fried chicken with caviar to Le Burger, chef Angie Mar on making food she believes in

A Chinese-American chef who ‘can’t really cook Chinese food’, Angie Mar of New York’s Le B on her roots in food and not cooking for critics

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