Michael Anton Cooks

Join one of America's sharpest and most penetrating voices on politics in his kitchen—cooking, listening to music, and talking about what he loves.

This one is a bit different, and I think you’ll like it.

If you subscribe to Late Republic Nonsense, you probably know my good friend and colleague, Michael Anton.

In addition to being one of the few on the Right who are significantly moving the discourse, he spends his time writing and teaching Hillsdale College grad students about Machiavelli, Clausewitz and others. I’m both proud and blessed to be in the trenches with him at the Claremont Institute, where we’re both senior fellows, and part of a truly amazing group of friends.

Mike served as in the National Security Council, as the Deputy Assistant to the President for Strategic Communications, under President Trump. He’s the author of The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return; the hugely influential essay, “The Flight 93 Election”; and also The Suit: A Machiavellian Approach to Men's Style. 

And he’s also a trained French chef. In 2018, The New York Times wrote about Mike volunteering as a line cook at a White House State Dinner for French President Emmanuel Macron.

Mr. Anton dates his interest in French cuisine to graduate school at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md., where, he says, he cooked the recipes in Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” years before Julie in the Nora Ephron film “Julie & Julia.” He worked as a vegetable cutter at a local restaurant, Treaty of Paris, and told his parents he wanted to drop out and go to culinary school (they vetoed that plan).

He honed his cooking while working in the Bush White House, once losing a half-finished demi-glace sauce — a three-day project — when the national security adviser called him from the Situation Room and told him to get to the office immediately. “Down the drain it all had to go,” he wrote in a 2014 essay, “the wages of divided loyalty.”

Living in New York during the Obama years, Mr. Anton decided to get serious about cooking. He took classes at the French Culinary Institute (now known as the International Culinary Center) in Lower Manhattan, and worked, unpaid, as a line cook at L’Ecole, a French restaurant that was affiliated with the institute.

“You got yelled at for screwing up,” he recalled. “But I liked the fact that they didn’t let you get away with things.”

This time, Mike gets to complete his demi-glace.

In fact, he was about to start cooking a lamb demi-glace for 10 for a dinner party. “Film it as you go on your phone,” I told him. “Just imagine I’m there, and you’re describing how you make the meal.” He did, and I set to work to pull them together into a video. I think he had a blast making it; I had a blast putting it together but—I’m certain—the people who got a chance to eat the meal had the best time of all.

So for the next hour, you get to join Michael Anton in his kitchen—cooking, listening to music, and talking about what he loves. I hope you enjoy it.

*I very much want to recommend two pieces Mike has written about cooking. At CRB, he published “Work the Line,” a very beautifully-written essay about what happens in the best restaurant kitchens; For the late Weekly Standard, he wrote a eulogy for Anthony Bourdain he called, “Bad for Chefs, Good for Food.” They are fantastic reads.

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Intro Music

The Anton film contains music from Gene Ammons’ early jukebox singles.