We went to Chiang Mai in the north to do a series of challenges, including cooking on an opium estate and preparing a banquet for royalty.
The chef Jacques Pépin, age 16, preparing a banquet for the Fireman's Ball at a hotel in Bellegarde, France.CreditCreditCourtesy of Jacques Pépin, from his book "The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen," (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015).
While we snorkel they prepare a banquet.
"It's our homage to chocolate". Today's philosophy of food, he says, is best captured by the 1987 film "Babette's Feast," in which an exiled Parisian chef prepares a banquet as if she's possessed.
So when André Soltner, the great chef who for thirty-four years presided over Lutèce, the redoubt of haute cuisine in New York, recently decided to come out of retirement, at the age of eighty, to prepare a banquet in the lost grand manner, it seemed a good time to go to see it done right.
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One of the book's most delightful scenes describes the frenzied Chalabi household preparing a lavish banquet of delicacies like fesanjoon (a Persian stew of chicken, pomegranates and walnuts), lamb in apricot sauce and dilled rice with broad beans, as well as the traditional whole roasted sheep on a bed of rice.
One night last spring, I observed Pasternack adroitly handling a crudo crisis that materialized as he was preparing a guest-chef banquet at the James Beard House, in Greenwich Village.
For a grand picnic on Gardiners Island in 1965, he brought together French chefs — Pierre Franey of Pavillon fame; Roger Fessaguet, from La Caravelle; Jean Vergnes, from the Colony; René Verdon, from the White House, and me — to prepare a sumptuous banquet for our family and friends, a feast he lavishly covered in The Times.
The show mixes physical comedy, noisy cooking and a story about a race to prepare a wedding banquet.
In Pacific Heights, Cecilia Chiang, who founded San Francisco's famed Mandarin Restaurant, and Bill He, of South Legend Sichuan, prepared a Chinese banquet for a guest list that included the filmmaker Wayne Wang and the food writer Ruth Reichl.
