This chef’s menu is a carnivore’s fever dream

How Angie Mar’s family drove her to love butchering and cooking meat

The Lily News
Jul 30, 2017 · 4 min read
Chef Angie Mar. (Michael Loccisano/Getty For Red/Lily illustration)

Adapted from a story by Alex Witchel for The Washington Post.

Chef Angie Mar spends all her “waking hours thinking about meat.”

“Breaking down animals is my Zen place,” Mar says of butchering meat every week. She does it on Mondays when her restaurant, the Beatrice Inn — a historic restaurant in Greenwich Village — closed.

Her passion for meat drove her to create a menu that is, in fact, a carnivore’s fever dream.

Mar serves smoked whole rabbits, flambéed whole ducks and cartoon-sized rib-eye steaks aged in whiskey for 120 days. Her meat fixation extends to fish — she bakes a whole branzino in a suet pastry — and to dessert, for which she mixes bone marrow into crème brûlée then cooks it inside a bone. Mar also makes lavish, and unexpected, use of fruit and herbs, butter and cream, and truffles, truffles everywhere.

Mar became the executive chef of Beatrice Inn in 2013, when the restaurant was owned by Graydon Carter. Under Carter, it went from a faded neighborhood Italian restaurant to a high-toned celebrity haunt. Mar bought it in 2016.

This year, Food & Wine magazine named Mar one of its Best New Chefs. She won last year’s Chochon 555, an annual event in which chefs celebrate the heritage pig. In 2015, she conquered “Chopped: Grill Masters.”

Angie Mar. (Cole Saladino/Thrillist)

Before she established herself as the Willy Wonka of meat, Mar sold commercial real estate in Los Angeles for 10 years. She needed to make money, and her family wanted her to have a corporate job — and babies.

But eventually, selling office space felt empty. Mar realized she wanted to be in the kitchen and began cooking professionally at 28. After all, the Seattle native already had restaurants in her DNA.

Mar’s mom, Nancy, was raised between Taipei and England, and her family owned a noodle business. Nancy passed her taste for Sunday roasts and meat pies on to her daughter, which is why you won’t find brunch at the Beatrice Inn. There is a Sunday roast instead, with prime rib carved tableside.

Mar’s aunt, Ruby Chow, was the first Chinese American in Seattle to open a Chinese restaurant outside of Chinatown in 1948. Bruce Lee, the son of a family friend, washed dishes there. Mar’s father, Roy, cooked there before becoming a dentist.

Ruby and Roy were two of 10 children. Their parents emigrated from China to the United States to work on the railroads, but they died when Ruby was in her teenage years. She worked tirelessly to keep the younger children out of foster homes. During the Great Depression, she sent them to the back doors of Chinatown restaurants, begging for scraps.

When Roy became an adult and he could afford meat, it became his top priority.

“Dad always had steaks and prime rib, liver and onions, corned beef,” Mar recalled. “Because he grew up during the Depression, everything was always saved. My brothers, cousin and I would race to the fridge in the mornings to see who could get the leftover T-bone or rib-eye and have beef bones for breakfast.”

When Mar’s parents split when she was 14, she started experimenting in the kitchen. But no matter what, her father always prepared a Sunday supper. Mar learned how to make pork shoulder braised in milk, and that dish is still on her menu today.

“Sunday supper was a big round table with a Lazy Susan holding big pots, and everything was family style,” Mar said. “That’s why I serve so many dishes that way here, so people can order a bunch of things and explore the tastes and textures.”

Although her parents originally wanted a different life for her, Mar says she thinks her dad is proud of what she accomplished. Tearing up, she describes the admiration she has for her father.

“My dad is such an inspiration, growing up with nothing,” she said. “He’ll tell us stories about all of them sleeping in one room in Chinatown, keeping the family together. He always said, ‘If you build something, you build it with family.’ My two younger brothers run my website. My cousin is my business partner. I know my father would be proud of me regardless, but that we’re doing this as a family is tremendously important to him.”

The Lily

The Lily was the first U.S. newspaper for and by women. We’re bringing it back.

The Lily News

Written by

The Lily

The Lily

The Lily was the first U.S. newspaper for and by women. We’re bringing it back.

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