Category: New York

A New York Home Made Delicacy Named Mirjam Lavabre

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A New York Home Made Delicacy Named Mirjam Lavabre
By Rachel Brunet, Editor of Le Petit Journal New York
The original version of this article was published in French in Le Petit Journal New York

Mirjam Lavabre’s home-made foie gras with sauternes is much more than just a holiday tradition, it has become a New York institution. She cooks the Hudson Valley duck livers halfway with sweet wine from Bordeaux and sprinkles them with both passion and generosity. A global citizen, Mirjam has pleased her customers palates for over a decade. Profile of a multilingual gastronome who has been living in the United States for nearly 30 years.

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The Power of Words to Empower Women

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To Power of Words to Empower Women: Five questions to poet Amanda Gorman


Amanda Gorman looks a bit younger than her age of 22 says, and at 22, the Los Angeles born activist has already reached heights that very few people have. A Harvard University student, she made her way as a Youth Delegate to the United Nations in 2013  after listening Pakistani survivor Malala Yousafzai speak. Her own words made her poet. She became the first National Youth Poet Laureate in 2017 and ambitions to run for President in the United States sometimes.


A young poet? Think again. Arthur Rimbaud was a teenager when he composed some of his most famous poems.


Gorman is a poet, an activist and a social entrepreneur. Period. She is a leader whose voice is already vital. She created a youth writing program, read poetry on MTV and at the Library of Congress, and she just authored the foreword of  Vital Voices: 100 Women Using Their Power to Empower (Assouline). No wonder her portrait, created by Gayle Kabaker, made the cover of a book that includes Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde, Fashion Designer Diane Von Furstenberg, and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.


No surprise either: her foreword is a poem. It is about words after all, and sharing them.


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At Your Home Without Me: Jerry Wonda Shares Music He Loves

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At Your Home Without Me: Jerry Wonda Shares Music He Loves

When I connected via Zoom with producer and former Fugees’ bass player Jerry Wonda Duplessis, I was greeted with music and rhythm, Bowie’s Let’s Dance! Seated with his bass guitar at arms’ reach at his Minnesota studio, minutes away from Prince’s home and the sadly well-known street where George Floyd was choked to death, Wonda is doing what he loves the most, sharing the music he loves.


His music of course. That includes hits such as Fugees’ cover of Killing Me Softly, Shakira’s Hips Don’t Lie, Carlos Santana’s Maria Maria, Melissa Ethridge’s Pulse and more recently the viral success of Newark’s Mayor Ras Baraka’s What We Want.


Music from others as well. That day, Wonda was in the mood for the period-worthy Harold Melvin’s Wake Up Everybody and a song he and I both like dearly, The Eagles’ iconic Hotel California. With some of his musical friends, Wonda launched early May ‘Share Music You Love,’ an initiative to raise funds for MusiCares and help musicians while concerts are halted. A UN Goodwill Ambassador for Haiti, Wonda is also working on bringing music, voices and musicians, professionals or not, from all over the world into a song to symbolize unity.


Born in Haiti, Wonda has never forgotten the donkey he rode to school before he moved to East Orange, New Jersey, into the home of his cousin, Wyclef Jean. He now lives for sharing his luck and dreams with others, children who like him, are born into poverty. “I went to school to be a recording engineer,” Wonda told me, “but I wanted to be Quincy Jones. I wanted to make the music, I wanted to be a producer. I wanted to produce a lot of Michael Jacksons!”


And so, he did.

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At Your Home, Without Me. Alexandra Morris’ Own Guide to Reinvent Parties

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At Your Home, Without Me: Alexandra Morris’ Own Guide to Reinvent Parties

— Note that Tastings and Vranken Pommery America, along with the French Institute Alliance Française, will host a webinar / food, wine and Champagne tasting next June 29th at 630pm EST. Although limited to FIAF Young Patrons, you sill could participate by registering through Tastings Website (Click Here) | limited spots available, fee applies for dinner, wine and champagne delivered to your doorstep in New York City (60USD per person all included) —

The New York restaurants were asleep, all of them, when thousands of miles away, the godfather of dining, of elegance and the signature behind the crême brulée discreetly passed away in his native hilltop Tuscan village of Montecatini at the age of 88. Sirio Maccioni, the founder of the legendary Cirque, had defined an era of New York cuisine. Sirio was not a chef, but a Maître D’, a master in welcoming the rich, the famous, the Sinatras, and and the rest of us, the invisible food lovers. When he was in Manhattan, Sirio sat at the entrance of Le Cirque everyday faithfully, until its doors were finally closed in 2018. Sirio hired the best chefs from around the world, and was notorious for stealing them from other kitchens, which is how he came to find Daniel Boulud in 1986.

To Alexandra Morris, the glamorous, mischievous, somehow reserved, founder of Tastings–one of New York’s most renowned catering companies, as well as two restaurants in East Harlem, Maccioni was a legend.

When restaurants eventually wake up from the Covid pause New York, the landscape will be an uncharted territory. The elders perhaps will recall Maccioni’s tales and wonder what he would have done to adapt to the new gastronomic scene and to the disappearance of flamboyant cocktails and galas for a while. Alexandra Morris has already started to imagine her new tasty relationship with her clients, the restaurant at home and the digital parties. She calls it, ‘Tastings 2.0.’

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At Leah Pisar Home Without Me: Donald Trump, Ambushed or Unmasked?

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At Your Home Without Me with Leah Pisar
Donald Trump, Ambushed or Unmasked?

[Translated from French]

Over the last few weeks, the health crisis has morphed into a full-fledged socio-political crisis within the United States. An inevitable explosion in unemployment, resulting from these extra-ordinary circumstances, paired with the anti-racist protests and riots sweeping not only the nation, but the world, in the wake of George Floyd’s death, are proof that this is a turbulent period indeed.

In addition to the pandemic and the protests, the White House’s reaction to the upheaval has set the tone for the upcoming presidential election–it is a climate with which the American people have become very familiar over the past three months of quarantine. That is: utterly out of the ordinary. 

It still remains difficult to determine whether Donald Trump has cannily taken advantage of a violent political situation mirroring a divided America, one which he does not seem interested in reconciling; or if he has gone too far and, finally, crossed a line. With declining approval ratings, some cracks in the heretofore seamless Republican support he used to enjoy, and disagreement seeping within his own administration, has Donald Trump begun to jeopardize his chances for re-election on Nov. 3rd? The 2020 presidential election will offer voters a stark choice between a divided, individualistic society; and a united America that is open to the world.

It is a struggle between “two visions of America,” in which “the soul of this country and the balance of the world” are at stake, explains Franco-American writer and former advisor to President Clinton Leah Pisar. Current President of the Aladdin Project—a NGO that works for intercultural rapprochement and the rejection of Holocaust denial, racism and anti-Semitism, Leah Pisar naturally sides with openness, humanity, and a shared world.

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