Frederic Morin - Joe Beef: Surviving the Apocalypse, Another Cookbook of Sorts

I love restaurants. Everything about them. Always have.

A restaurant is both a superficial and deeply profound experience. Restaurants can leave an existential mark on your life, though youre essentially just sitting down to eat food and drink booze.

A restaurant is built on a foundation of broken hearts, failed relationships, trips to the hardware store, the clinic, extended credit, and the goodwill of people who care about you. Writing a book and building a restaurant are deeply personal acts. They require everything of you, your passion and your spirit. You can meander in fits and starts for months, years even, down the wrong path, all to get to the right one. Books and restaurants, the best ones in my estimation, are built on unworkable rewrites and failed ideas, and let me tell you: that body count is high.

Writing a book or opening a restaurant can make you lose your mind.

Until you havent.

And then it clicks. And thats Day 1. Thats where you start.

Building and then maintaining a restaurant is about loyalty. And this is why Joe Beef thrives. Because it is a deeply personal restaurant. That is not to say the food made in this tiny French restaurant isnt technically on point (it is) or that the old cottage influence of Maine or Gasp wont fill you with nostalgia (it will), or that the care of the staff doesnt enchant you (it does).

The attraction to Joe Beef is due to its authenticity. You cannot bullshit people with an inauthentic voice or cooking. Well, you can. But it wont last.

Deeply personal is the beginning and the end of Fred and Davids playbook.

The point of a prologue is to make overarching sense of the chapters, to lay out the sequence of what youre about to read. To pop the hood and preview whats inside. But Im not going to do that. Because this book is simply about where we are now.

Surviving the Apocalypse was a theme we dreamt up in 2014. Were well aware there have been a few instances (some extreme weather, more-than-extreme election[s]) over the last couple of years when it seemed survivalism and talk of impending doom had jumped the shark. The cars were packed and the hazmat suits taped shut. The zeitgeist seemed to be closing in on us. Maybe the world was actually going to end. But this book was never about the headline.

This book is about how to build things for yourself.

This book is about how to make it on your own.

We dont expect anyone to build a trout pond that doesnt work, like our pond at Joe Beef. Or to create your own makeshift cellar to house thirty-one bunker-friendly foods (though it would be prudent). But maybe youll write a poem about the Laurentians. Or make wine in a YETI cooler. Or cook up a pot-au-feu in the autumn for your girlfriend, and then a baby for the spring.

We set out to write a book about shutting out the noise, because that was the problem in our own lives. We vowed there would be fewer recipes than in our first book (