AMADOU LY | NYC Pastry Chef at Restaurant Insieme

It’s hard for Chef Amadou Ly to blend in. Not that he wants to. He has a unique, gravelly voice that is impossible to miss and equally as impossible to imitate. He used to have a big afro of black hair, styled neatly back into two buns, until the Health Department made him cut it. He has a vibrant energy, and a little sprinkling of the craziness and unpredictable temper of any chef.

There is nothing predictable about him, in fact, whether you’re meeting him for the first time, or have known him for years. Even as a kid, he was spontaneous, or, as he puts it “a little confused”. He was born in Togo, in Western Africa, and lived with his parents and his three younger brothers and a younger sister until he was 25. The family moved around a lot, mostly between Ghana and Senegal.

“My father sells art, African art, antiques. He buys them and then sells them. He would travel a lot, to Europe, and sometimes he would bring us.” Amadou was interested in art as a kid, especially painting. Being that he was raised in French-speaking cultures, he says: “I thought I’m gonna end up in Europe. But I really didn’t know what I’m going to do.”

He spent a brief period of time in Paris when he was 25, where he went to study Political Science. Then he returned to Ghana to study English, which prompted him to move to New York. Here, he took a part time job working at the restaurant Union Pacific on 22nd Street. “I worked in the kitchen. I was in charge of a lot of people.” And then, unexpectedly, he fell in love with pastry.

“Basically, I get immersed in the pastry. I thought, this is a great thing! It is more of an art to me than cooking, like, meat. And I love chocolate. So I thought, Well, here you go. I taught myself, basically by reading a lot. And I worked with some really great people, but the rest was just me because I loved it. The only thing I don’t like is cleaning up after you’re done. That’s the worst, man. The worst.”

As is to be expected, Amadou doesn’t know what will come next for him. “Something in pastry, always, but it’s a lot more broader than you think. I wanna do more things, challenge myself. You can’t spend the rest of your life in a pastry kitchen.”

Pete and J | Musicians

Pete: I remember being 14, I had just taken a biology test and I thought I got a C, and I remember thinking: That’s okay. I’m gonna play music anyway. I went to Amherst College, and, well, was a Latin America History major… but it led to playing music nonetheless!

J: I was already at Amherst, as a Music and Political Science major. And they have this thing there for freshman orientation that is a three day camping trip out into the woods, and I, as a 20 year old sophomore, was a trip leader. And when Pete came in as a freshman, he was in my group.

Pete: I was terrified. Actually, I wasn’t terrified until I met you.

J: So then we started hanging out. I asked Pete to join this a cappella group I was directing. Because, that’s what you do with guy friends. You ask them to be in your a cappella group. But, from the beginning we had a pretty good idea that we wanted to play music together.

Pete: We never talked about it, but we knew. We met each other and we were like, okay, this is so much better than anything else that’s going to come along.

J: It still sucks.

Pete: It still sucks, but maybe if we play together long enough, it will get better…

J: We moved to Williamsburg in 2005, after spending a summer living at my parents’ house outside Philadelphia, and playing open mics there every night of the week.

Pete: Yeah, until one night, at the dinner table, J’s mom called us freeloaders.

J: Which we were.

Pete: Which we were.

J: So we moved into a loft in Brooklyn with our drummer, Sarab, and a bassist. And it was terrible.

Pete: Terrible idea. And our bassist at the time pretty much told us that he hated our music. Which didn’t help things.

J: Yeah, if you’re gonna have a band, make sure they all like your music.

Pete: Yeah. J and I were both playing lead guitar, and I was like, Wait- let’s make some sense out of this. Why don’t you play lead guitar and I’ll play piano? So I went out and bought a keyboard and just started playing around with it. We both were writing, but the reason we worked so well together was that J was more inclined to write and I was more inclined to play.

J: We both come from a place where every song has to be saying something.

Pete: Yeah. Someone told us once, If you’re collaborating with someone, you should always trust the other person more than you trust yourself. I think the most amazing part of being a musician is the chance to be a part of that conversation that happens about art. The vision, for us, is just to be unimpeded in making the music we really want to make; the art we want to make.

www.myspace.com/peteandj

About five years ago, I went down to the corner store for a pack of gum, you know? And I know the guy, and whatever, and he goes “One dollar.” And I was like, What? A dollar for a pack of gum? How the hell is it a dollar? I guess I’d just been paying it and not even thinking about it. I kinda came home and started thinking about that for the whole day. I don’t know why I couldn’t stop thinking about it. So I went down to the supermarket and started looking at the prices of things. I started making phone calls. Like, I’d call Tropicana and say “Why is this five dollars?” I called Gucci, who I saw was charging $350 for a pair of PVC plastic shoes. The conversations were ridiculous. But this is the kind of stuff people think about, but they never take the time to really get into it. All I did was take that time.

At that time, I found out about this program that lets you broadcast your own radio shows live over the internet and I got really excited about it. Literally, the first show was my cell phone plugged into the computer. But the phone didn’t stop ringing all night. Total strangers wanting to talk about coupon shopping. That turned into a podcast when it got too expensive to keep up; we were literally one of the very first podcasts on the internet. So then I thought, well why don’t we record a CD? We put it up on iTunes, sent it out to some Independent music stores and it went pretty well. I’d call comedy clubs and tell them I had a show about coupon shopping and they’d hang up on me. We started doing night clubs in the village for a while and I spoke at a conference on coupon shopping for like 500 people that was totally insane. Then I said, I wanna make a movie about this stuff, you know? I was writing something, I didn’t know what it was gonna be, and 65,000 words later I thought: I guess it’s a book. So in that year we had gone from sitting around the house just having a good time to a book, a movie, a CD, and a live show. And now it’s how I make a living.

I’m always fighting this battle that coupon people have to be midwestern women with 20 children and it’s like: no, I am a straight guy living in NYC, doing all the things that other people living in NYC do. It’s not just about frugality: it’s more about having common sense when you shop in general. Even if you don’t shop with a coupon. The point is, when you pick something up, really think about the price and the value. And you have to be able to laugh about it. People look at me in the grocery store like I’m insane because I’m picking up the bottle of BBQ sauce and I’m laughing uncontrollably because the stuff they’re writing is just so senseless.

I’m not trying to get anybody upset, I’m just trying to tell a story. It’s my life: I’m not trying to convince you one way or another. I don’t care who you vote for, I’m not gonna tell you to boycott a store, to, like, burn down the dollar store, I don’t care how you live your life. I’m trying to make people see the absurdity of human behavior. I’ve made all these same mistakes myself and that’s why I find it so funny. It’s not that I don’t take it seriously, but it’s not that I don’t think it’s funny. When you get pulled over by the state troopers on the Staten Island Expressway for a having a car overflowing with free pudding cups… how do you not see humor in that?

www.retailanarchy.com