Test your Design IQ
MANILA, Philippines - Who was the French chef who became the youngest in France to earn two Michelin stars at the age of 28 and who later became known for freeing French cuisine in the US from orthodoxy and influenced a generation of chefs and food lovers?
He was born in 1946 in a small town in Armagnac country in southwestern France. After brief stints in restaurants in Paris and Monaco, he attended culinary school in Toulouse and then returned to his hometown, where he started working in the kitchen of an Italian restaurant.
He showed such promise that the owner of the restaurant decided he needed his own showplace. Together, they founded and renovated an old monastery, which they named La Table des Cordeliers.
His mentor’s faith was rewarded in 1974, when he became the youngest chef in France to earn two Michelin stars. He opened his first restaurant named after him in 1979 at the Watergate Hotelin Washington, DC. It drew not only the capital’s political elite, but also the chefs and restaurateurs from all over the world, who made the pilgrimage to taste his cooking and learn his techniques.
In a departure from the image of the haughty and secretive chef, he always made time to share his knowledge and methods with almost anyone who asked.
He had a rare eye for talent, and employed or counseled young chefs, including Eric Ripert of San Bernardin, Daniel Boulud, Christian Delouvrier of Lespinasse, and Sylvain Portay, formerly of Le Cirque and now at the Ritz Carlton in San Francisco.
Nowadays, some diners at fine restaurants take for granted ingredients like fresh foie gras, scallops plucked by scuba divers from the ocean floor, and wild mushrooms. But when he arrived in Washington in 1979, these things were largely unknown in the United States. French chefs in America then believed that everything was better back in France.
But he made it his business to seek out the ingredients he wanted, whether it was monkfish livers, squid ink sacs, or anything else that was routinely discarded. He did not simply try to reproduce the foods of France and Gascony, his birthplace, but he opened himself and French cooking to the vast arsenal of American ingredients.
“The challenge of cooking in America,” he said in 1987, “is to discover the newest and best products from the different states — baby eels and lamprey from Maine, fresh snails from Oregon, blowfish from the Carolinas and California oysters — and then learn to integrate them into your cuisine.”
To many chefs, who had been reared on the dogma of French recipes, such an approach was tremendously liberating. Chefs were equally awed by his almost instinctive comprehension of his ingredients.
By the time he passed away in November 2001 at the age of 55, he had changed the way Americans perceived French cooking.
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Last week’s question: Who is the prominent 20th century Finnish-American architect and industrial designer known for his Tulip Chair, which became the basis of seating used in the original Star Trek TV series?
Answer: Eero Saarinen
Winner: Linda Capistrano of QC
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