Talking to the Joe Beef chefs, who wrote a cookbook about the end of the world
LOS ANGELES - On a recent morning, chefs David McMillan and Frederic Morin sat at Chateau Marmont, the swank hotel on the Sunset Strip, to talk about their new book, "Joe Beef: Surviving the Apocalypse, Another Cookbook of Sorts."
It is a sequel to their debut cookbook, which they also wrote with Meredith Erickson, and it is again about the pair's much-lauded restaurant Joe Beef in Montreal, where they practice a distinctly Quebecois style of French-influenced cooking.
In the diffuse light of the hotel's patio-adjacent dining room there were double cappuccinos on the table, an uneasy smokiness to the air from the wildfires scorching nearby neighborhoods, and the distinct feeling that the ghost of Anthony Bourdain (patron saint of Joe Beef, a habitue of the Chateau) was among us. The end of the world, the unifying principle of their new cookbook, seemed a reasonable topic of conversation, though it quickly strayed darker and truer than just cookbook chatter.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I'm just going to start with the obvious: Why the apocalypse?
David McMillan: There was a moment when it hit us. We'd gone from lean-and-mean cooking machines who could work 120 hours a week and not feel anything and all of a sudden we had multiple businesses, three kids each, 80 employees. And there
