Two years later he earned the title best craftsman in France, an honor given to chefs who survive a grueling competition. “He won more competitions than anyone, and he introduced that aesthetic, that precision, that beauty on the plate, into his cooking,” said Eric Ripert, who was Mr. Robuchon’s fish chef at Jamin and is now the chef at, and a co-owner of, Le Bernardin in New York. “That was his signature, and it has never been duplicated with as much success.” At the Hôtel Nikko in Paris, Mr. Robuchon earned two Michelin stars, and with the opening of Jamin, he moved to the front rank of French chefs. Restaurant Robuchon, which opened in 1994 on the Avenue Raymond-Poincaré, elevated him even further, with a homier, more robust style of cooking reflected in dishes like pot-au-feu of cured pork with buttered cabbage and truffles and roasted pigeon with potatoes fried in duck fat. The urge to simplify only grew stronger with time. “The older I get, the more I realize the truth is: the simpler the food, the more exceptional it can be,” he told Business Insider in 2014. “I never try to marry more than three flavors in one dish. I like walking into a kitchen and knowing that the dishes are identifiable and the ingredients within them easy to detect.”<doc-sep>The French chef holds the record for most Michelin stars in the world. French chef Joel Robuchon, who holds the record for most Michelin stars in the world, has died at age 73. Robuchon, whose globe-encircling operations include restaurants in New York, Montreal and Las Vegas, died in Geneva, Switzerland on Monday of cancer. He had been diagnosed with a pancreatic tumor over a year earlier. Get push notifications with news, features and more. Born in Poitiers, France, in April, 1945, Robuchon initially prepared for a religious life, entering a seminary at the age of 12. There, he discovered his path. “Between studies and prayers,” he told GALA Magazine in 2014, “I found a moment of relaxation compared to the religion training, when I helped prepare meals in the kitchen. That’s when I decided not to consecrate myself to the priesthood but to cooking.” When his parents divorced at 15, Robuchon left the seminary to work at a local inn. “I started scouring casseroles, lighting the ovens early in the morning, plucking the fowl in the afternoon, folding linen and mowing the lawn,” he said. “You worked 14 hours per day, without rest, for periods which could last six months.” After apprenticing in several restaurants around France, Robuchon arrived in Paris, and found work at La Vert Galant and in 1966 went into service at the Berkeley, a fashionable café whose clientele included Salvador Dali, Onassis and Callas. At 29, Robuchon moved into hotel kitchen service—where he found himself heading a 90-man kitchen brigade—and after attaining his first Michelin stars, he stepped away in 1981, opening a restaurant which became a legend: Jamin. A small side-street restaurant near the Trocadéro in Paris, Jamin earned its first Michelin star in its first year of operation. Its second and third came immediately after. It was a feat never before achieved in the Guide’s long history. Robuchon himself wryly attributed success to the fact that at the time of Jamin’s opening, joking to La Nouvelle Republique that “the potato had been banned from Paris’ great restaurants.” “My mother served puree regularly with Sunday chicken,” Robuchon said. “We’d go to the family farm to find them. The potatoes were the base vegetable in our house.” His home-style, ultra-buttery puree became the gold standard for mashed potatoes. Like Paul Bocuse, Robuchon’s cooking was as refined as possible but true to his basic love of country cooking. Named Chef of the Century by Gault & Millau in 1990, Robuchon was as much a French culinary attraction as truffles, and reservations at Jamin as hard to come by and just as expensive. At the height of success in 1994, Robuchon accepted the offer of a large prestigious restaurant and shuttered Jamin. Enigmatic and deeply private, he stayed very briefly at the new location on Avenue Raymond Poincare before announcing his complete retirement from cooking. He reemerged on the culinary scene in 2003, opening his first L’Atelier restaurant operations in Tokyo and Paris. In 2017, Robuchon opened his 12th outpost of L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon in New York City, and revealed to the New York Post he had overhauled his diet to lose 60 lbs. “My menu is full of antioxidants and nutrients now,” he said. “I have so much energy…I wouldn’t be able to live the way I do now without my diet.”<doc-sep>Joël Robuchon, who has died of cancer aged 73, was the last of his kind – a French chef who was universally acknowledged as the greatest in the world at a time when French haute cuisine was still the standard by which all other food was judged. His open-minded and informal approach to the business of fine dining opened the way for the vivid creativity of Ferran Adrià, Heston Blumenthal’s playful and exquisite dishes and the Nordic culinary jazz of René Redzepi. “To describe Joël Robuchon as a cook is a bit like calling Pablo Picasso a painter, Luciano Pavarotti a singer, Frederic Chopin a pianist,” his friend the food writer Patricia Wells said of him. Robuchon was born in Poitiers, the son of Henri Robuchon, a mason, and Julienne (nee Douteau), a housewife. He began cooking at an absurdly young age, at the seminary in the village of Mauléon, Deux-Sèvres, which he entered at 12 to be trained as a Roman Catholic priest and where he helped out in the kitchens. (In his pomp, Robuchon was known as le moine – “the monk” – in part because of his early experiences at the seminary and in part in recognition of his extraordinary dedication to his chosen path.) He began his apprenticeship proper at the Relais du Poitiers at the age of 15. At 21 he travelled through France, learning about regional dishes and ingredients. This experience provided the basis for the gastronomic refinement of his mature years. Remarkably, in 1974 at the age of 29, he was appointed head chef of the Hotel Concorde La Fayette in Paris, in charge of 90 chefs serving a thousand dishes a day. In 1976 he won the Meilleur Ouvrier de France competition. In 1981, aged 36, he opened Jamin in the Rue de Longchamp in Paris, where he was awarded three Michelin stars in 1984, and where he began to create his international reputation. In 1989 he was named the “chef of the century” by two of France’s arbiters of culinary taste, Henri Gault and Christian Millau. Jamin became a place of gastronomic pilgrimage. The dishes and the experience of eating there will stay with anyone lucky enough to have done so. As a restaurateur Robuchon brought open-mindedness, creative genius and a drive for perfection. The level of brilliance achieved at Jamin could not have been achieved without a certain rigour and exactitude. Those chefs who worked in Jamin’s kitchen, including Gordon Ramsay, Michael Caines, Tom Aikens and Richard Neat, have borne witness to Robuchon’s ferocious discipline in the kitchen and to the regimented cooking process. Joël Robuchon with guests at L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon in Paris, France, which he opened in 2003, inspired by a demand for great food in less formal surroundings. Photograph: Owen Franken/Corbis via Getty Images While the dishes were visually brilliant, technically flawless and a joy to eat, Robuchon had little time for the frills and furbelows, and stifling atmosphere, that traditionally had characterised French fine dining. The atmosphere in the Jamin dining room was notably relaxed, the staff as engaging as they were expert, and it was not unknown for an appreciative guest to be offered a second helping of a dish that they had particularly enjoyed. Robuchon was no food snob. He was shaped by the radical ideas of nouvelle cuisine, but his early experience with French regional cooking opened his eyes to the potential of ingredients that were not usually part of the haute cuisine repertoire. Although he is most famous for having elevated mashed potato to high art by adapting Fernand Point’s axiom of the secret of French cooking being “du beurre, du beurre et encore du beurre”, he also combined caviar with cauliflower, truffle with garlic and pigeon with cabbage. He brought an earthy quality to the refinements of nouvelle cuisine. “You don’t need expensive or exotic ingredients to create a great cuisine,” he said. He opened an eponymous restaurant in 1994 that was promptly named the best in the world by the International Herald Tribune. But the following year he closed the Restaurant Joël Robuchon and retired. He had seen too many of his contemporaries burn out or die because of the exacting nature of their profession. A man of restless energy and broad sympathies, a few years later, in 2003, he opened L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon in Paris, a refined form of bistro, with a no-booking policy, counter service, stainless steel cutlery, glass (as opposed to crystal) and dazzling dishes. He was inspired by a demand for great food in less formal eating surroundings and the fact that some of his talented young proteges found it difficult to raise the money to start their own establishments without the name of a high-profile backer. The first atelier (meaning, literally, workshop) was greeted with almost hysterical acclaim and long queues. It was soon followed by other Robuchon establishments in cities including Bangkok, Las Vegas, London, Macau, New York, Shanghai and Tokyo, each incorporating local ingredients and techniques into what is, essentially, classic French cooking. At the most recent count, there are 26 ateliers, tea salons and bars which have been awarded a total of 31 Michelin stars between them, including five with the Michelin maximum of three stars. At their peak there were 32 Michelin stars, the most to have been held by any single chef. In The Man Who Ate Everything, the American food writer Jeffrey Steingarten quotes Robuchon as saying “Ah, les frites. I know nobody who does not go nuts in front of a plate of crispy French fries.” He believed in making food accessible, informal and sociable, a philosophy that informed his books and subsequent television shows such as Bon Appétit Bien Sur, which ran for a decade on French TV. In person Robuchon was modest, even quite shy, but with a lively sense of humour. Behind that lay a steely reserve and a clear sense of purpose. He always said that there was no such thing as a perfect meal. “There’s always something that could be done better.”<doc-sep>Legendary chef Joël Robuchon, who mentored Gordon Ramsay, Eric Ripert and many other celebrity chefs, has died at the age of 73 from cancer. On Monday, his friends, colleagues and fans took to social media to pay tribute to the chef. Throughout his career, Robuchon was awarded many of the top honors in the food world. When a restaurant is given just one star in a Michelin restaurant guide, it's a really, really big deal. Over his lifetime, Robuchon's combined restaurants earned 32 Michelin stars, making him the world's most Michelin-starred chef ever. He was also named "chef of the century" in 1989 by the French restaurant guide Gault & Millau. He leaves behind an empire with 26 restaurants, including 11 L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon restaurants, with locations throughout the world. Ramsay, who worked for Robuchon at his first restaurant Jamin in Paris the 1980s, called his mentor "The God Father of Michelin." The British TV host wrote about working under Robuchon in his autobiography "Humble Pie." Ramsay was the only person who Robuchon ever threw a plate at in his career, Robuchon told The Telegraph in 2013. "I remember it was a dish of langoustine ravioli," he said. Even though the two butted heads at times when they worked together, Ramsay had great admiration for Robuchon. Robuchon was also a mentor to Eric Ripert, who remembered the "demanding" chef as the "King of all Chefs." Ripert wrote that he was "shocked and saddened" by the news of his death. It has been a difficult summer for Ripert, whose best friend, Anthony Bourdain, died by suicide on June 8 while the two were in France filming "Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown." Shocked and very sad by the loss of my Mentor Joel Robuchon. The most rigorous,precise,demanding, ultra gifted King of all Chefs... RIP Monsieur Robuchon pic.twitter.com/RCx8cj5m1I — Eric Ripert (@ericripert) August 6, 2018 In 2010, Ripert told TODAY Food that if he could only eat one dish made by another chef for the rest of his life, it would have been "an old signature dish from chef Joel Robuchon: braised pig head with mashed potatoes." Robuchon's mashed potatoes, called pommes purée in French, became one of his most famous dishes thanks to their simplicity and accessibility. Made with just four ingredients — and a potato-to-butter ratio of 2-to-1 — his mashed potatoes are truly ethereal. Ripert told TODAY Food that they were "the most silky, smooth mashed potatoes you've ever had in your life." Celebrity chefs Andrew Zimmern, David Chang, Simon Majumdar and José Andrés also paid tribute to Robuchon on Twitter. Joel Robuchon 1947-2018 A very sad day for any of us in our industry and for the millions of other who were touched by this amazing man. When I was 23 I almost crapped myself being part of a team cooking him a birthday dinner in NYC. Over the years he was beyond kind to me. #sad — Andrew Zimmern (@andrewzimmern) August 6, 2018 RIP Chef Joel Robuchon. You the changed the whole game. I always thought of you as the Bill Walsh of gastronomy pic.twitter.com/UFcjESKZqI — Dave Chang (@davidchang) August 6, 2018 R.I.P Joel Robuchon. Another sad loss for the culinary world. — Simon Majumdar (@SimonMajumdar) August 6, 2018 Robuchon was one of the first chefs of his generation to build a true, global restaurant empire and influenced restaurateurs like Danny Meyer, the businessman behind Union Square Hospitality Group, who has created many fine dining restaurants, as well as the burger chain Shake Shack. Meyer also paid tribute to the chef. Thank you for the profound inspiration, Joël Robuchon. Our profession is in your debt. — Danny Meyer (@dhmeyer) August 6, 2018 In more recent years, Robuchon focused on discovering new ways to make vegetables the centerpiece of a meal and created inventive methods of cooking more healthfully with less butter, oil and additional fats. He also worked with scientists to better understand the effect of food on the human body. "We the chefs have a responsibility to learn about the chemical makeup of food!" he told Food & Wine in 2011. Robuchon's legacy lives on in the work of Ramsay, Ripert and the many other chefs he influenced throughout his celebrated career.<doc-sep>
The French master chef Joël Robuchon, who rebelled against the stuffy world of fine dining, elevated mashed potato into an art form, and built up a culinary empire across the world, has died aged 73. Named the “chef of the century” by the Gault et Millau cooking guide in 1990, Robuchon was both a highly disciplined perfectionist and a kitchen rebel who became known for cooking mashed potato so exquisitely that critics described eating it as an overwhelmingly “emotional” experience. Robuchon went from working-class roots to young stardom in the 1970s Paris world of fine dining, where eye-watering prices, starched tablecloths and silver cutlery were the norm. But he was credited with changing the rules of French cooking and restoring heartiness to the stark dishes of nouvelle cuisine. He believed it was not the tiny sculpted portions on platters that should matter to diners, but hearty and simple dishes – truffle tart, creamed cauliflower, langoustine ravioli – cooked without mixing too many flavours at once, and sourcing the best produce. He did not shy away from luxury products such as caviar, but his food was described as simple because he preached the use of only three or four ingredients in most dishes, and his goal was always to show off their flavours. During his first 30 years in leading restaurants, he built up a stellar reputation, a long list of Michelin stars and prizes in the upper echelons of fine French cooking. Then suddenly, aged 51, Robuchon announced he was giving this up to spend more time with his family, live life to the full and enjoy nature. After spending all his time in kitchens from the age of 15, he said he had never taken the time to see a snowy mountain top. “You have to know when it’s time to quit,” he said at the time. “A great chef has to be in great shape. Cooking is tough. It’s like being an athlete who has to stay really fit.” Robuchon was also critical of the stuffy, snobbish and pressurised world of French restaurant rankings, where he felt ironed tablecloths were wrongly taking precedence over the value of flavours. But he burst back on to the restaurant scene a few years later with fresh ideas about the notion of community and shared, sociable eating. Robuchon was credited with transforming restaurant tradition with his notion of ateliers (workshops) – intimate restaurants where diners sat at a counter surrounding the kitchen. There was no dress code and no reservations, even if the queues were vast. Guy Job, who worked with Robuchon, called this “three-star food with stainless steel cutlery and glass glasses, not crystal ones”. Over the next 20 years, Robuchon built up a multimillion-euro global empire of 39 establishments, from fine restaurants to clubs. In 2016, he held a world record 32 Michelin stars. This year, he still had 31 stars, including five three-star restaurants. He owned restaurants in cities including Paris, Monaco, Hong Kong, Las Vegas, Tokyo and Bangkok. But Robuchon had also become a celebrity chef who insisted it was important to pass his knowledge on, with TV shows, books, courses and even by advising supermarket brands. Throughout his career, his name would be for ever associated with mashed potato. “These mashed potatoes, it’s true, made my reputation. I owe everything to these mashed potatoes,” he said once during a demonstration of how to make the almost liquid dish. “Maybe it’s a little bit of nostalgia, Proust’s madeleines. Everyone has in his memory the mashed potatoes of his mother, the mashed potatoes of his grandmother.” Robuchon was born just before the end of the second world war into a working-class family in Poitiers, western France. His father was a stonemason and his mother was a cleaner, and he grew up steeped in Catholicism. It was when he entered seminary school aged 12 and found he preferred to spend his time helping nuns prepare vegetables that he realised he was interested in cooking. Later, everyone would assume the rebellious act of dressing himself and his chefs in black instead of the traditional white was a nod to his Catholicism. He insisted it was not, saying: “I just don’t like ties.” He was extremely competitive, a perfectionist who asked a lot of his staff. The British chef Gordon Ramsay described working for him as like working for the special forces, accusing Robuchon of once throwing a plate of langoustine ravioli at him for not cooking it properly.