Teen chef whips up duck confit for fancy NYC benefit dinner for kids with cancer: ‘Proud to be helping’
NY Post
Upper East Side high school freshman Joshua Small is cooking up hope.
Small, a French-American student at the Lycée Français de New York, regaled 60 diners as the acting executive chef of East Harlem’s Tastings NYC Saturday, a “Youth to Youth” dinner to raise money for the sick children at the Ronald McDonald House-New York.
“I’m proud to be a kid helping other kids,” the self-taught chef, who’s only taken one training course at Lower Manhattan’s Institute of Culinary Education, told The Post.
For $150, ticketed attendees of the three-course fête were welcomed to cocktail hour hors d’oeuvres of gougères, or French cheese puffs, as well as Japanese chicken meatballs and 14-year-old Small’s signature gazpacho shots.
Appetizers, ramp arancini atop an arugula salad with a dollop of micro lentils, preceded Small’s pièce de résistance entree — duck confit, served with a butternut squash purée and grilled fiddlehead ferns.
As a sweet finish, the French-American Gen Alpha treated banqueters to Basque cheesecake paired with kumquats. The choice bites were accompanied by alcoholic and non-boozy beverages designed by the wunderkind.
It was a flashback to NYC in the 1990s.
The killing of Iran’s tyrannical Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on Saturday in an unprecedented joint military attack by the US and Israel called Operation Epic Fury set off widespread celebrations from Iranians around the world — as President Trump said it would give them their “greatest chance” to “take back the country.” Meanwhile, in Iran, a lack of internet has made it impossible for Iranians to easily communicate daily conditions. Over a period of three days, with limited VPN connection, an eyewitness currently in Tehran — who, for her safety, is concealing her identity — shared her account of life under a country in the midst of battle with The Post’s Natasha Pearlman.
After exactly 120 years, the curtain has fallen on the Theater District institution Barbetta, with the iconic Italian restaurant having served its final course Friday night.