LA: I’ve got to ask. How do you get the steak done? How are you ordering it?
JB: I order it à point, à point, which is at point, so right in the middle. It’s still pink, still pink, but it’s not saignant or it’s not bleu, so to speak.
LA: A medium rare.
JB: A medium rare.
LA: So, medium rare. Okay.
JB: Yeah, absolutely.
LA: Noted.
JB: I mean, I have good friends that if they’re cooking steak at home, they’ll cook the heck out of that thing. It will be like shoe leather. They go to a restaurant. They won’t dare order anything less than à point because they’d be embarrassed as a French person to order a well-cooked steak.
I’m in a cooking school all day, so I’m sampling food because I’m nosy and I want to make sure we’re doing good stuff. But what I do love is to cook a special meal. Again, that’s a wonderful time to bring people together for holidays that are important to me, like Thanksgiving, which is a sacred holiday I hope to always celebrate with friends.
LA: Are you bringing French friends around the table for Thanksgiving?
JB: Yes, and they are obsessed with it. To get an invitation to Thanksgiving is so coveted, you cannot even imagine.
LA: I love that. I feel like it’s almost like Thanksgiving is the one time of year where Americans let themselves have the French approach to food.
JB: Exactly. Where you just eat all day and talk, and then eat your leftovers. It’s a wonderful holiday. It’s my favorite.
LA: Wouldn’t it be crazy if I just did it all the time?
JB: Wouldn’t that be wonderful?
LA: After the break, making macarons, croissants and French sauces at Jane’s school.
I want to talk about your school.
JB: Yes.
LA: There are so many classes and so many different types of things to master. There’s macrons, there’s croissants, there’s sauces. What are the most popular and also the hardest, and the ones that are the hardest for you to master as well?
JB: I’d say the most popular, croissant by a landslide. Summertime, definitely the French market because then you also get a cultural tour, so people love that. I think the hardest ones where you find people who are possibly more technical would be the sauce class. They’re not there for frills. They really want to learn something. We’re not doing cooking classes, we’re doing memories, which is a hard balance to get. We’re talking to lots of different people, different levels of experience. But you do find people with more technical experience tend to like to do the sauce class.
LA: Who are some of the characters that walk through your door?
JB: Oh, we get so many. We’re so lucky. I would say very heavy North American. All of our classes are in English, but we get people from all over the world. On the weekends, we get lots of Europeans, so it’s such a wonderful mix of people. We’re not meant to be cultural ambassadors for the world, but when you have a kitchen filled with people from all walks of the world, all religious beliefs, all different colors, shapes and sizes, and for that three hours, people are standing next to people they’ve only ever seen on the news, and perhaps not in a good way, that’s just a wonderful moment. That’s what food does. When you’re cooking with people, you learn so much about them. I mean, everybody wants to tell you how their grandmother did something. Isn’t that wonderful to discover someone new through food? Which, food is history.