60 Fun Facts About Chef

The word 'chef' reached English as a shortening of which French phrase?

Chef de cuisine, literally 'head of the kitchen'. On its own the French word only means chief or boss, which is why a chef de gare is the person in charge of a railway station.

Which chef drew on his military service to create the hierarchical kitchen "brigade" system?

Auguste Escoffier had been an army chef in the Franco-Prussian War. At a time when kitchens were loud and cooks drank on the job, he demanded cleanliness, discipline and silence.

At which London hotel was Nellie Melba first served the peach dessert named after her?

The Savoy. By its chef's own account, he served peaches and vanilla ice cream on a swan carved from ice, a nod to the opera she was singing; the raspberry purée and the name pêche Melba came later, at the Carlton.

In a classic kitchen brigade, which station chef prepares cold dishes such as salads, pâtés and terrines?

Garde manger, roughly 'food keeper'. The name comes from the cool larder where food was stored, which is why the cook in charge of it took on the cold dishes prepared there.

Which chef turned down the Kennedy White House to develop recipes for Howard Johnson's restaurants?

Jacques Pépin had been a chef to President Charles de Gaulle, yet he chose what was then America's largest restaurant chain. He stayed ten years and said the job taught him mass production and American tastes.

Which chef to Talleyrand and Tsar Alexander I is popularly credited with giving the toque its tall, stiff shape?

Marie-Antoine Carême wanted cooks in white because it looked clean, and is said to have stiffened his own cap with cardboard. Before him, French kitchen staff wore soft stocking caps whose colour showed their rank.

Which Julia Child cooking series, made at Boston's public television station, aired nationally from 1963 to 1973?

The French Chef grew out of a guest spot on a book-review programme: she cooked an omelette on air, and viewers wrote to the station asking for more.

Fannie Farmer's 1896 cookbook is credited with standardising which aspect of American recipes?

Measurements: she insisted on level cupfuls and spoonfuls so that a recipe came out the same every time. A paralytic stroke at 16 had ended her plans for college, and she took up cooking while recovering.

Before she became a chef, Julia Child worked for the OSS on a wartime project developing what?

Shark repellent: curious sharks kept bumping into underwater explosives meant for German U-boats and setting them off, so her OSS section worked on a coating to keep them away.

Julia Child graduated in 1951 from which famous Paris cooking school?

Le Cordon Bleu. Her first meal in France, oysters and sole meunière in Rouen in 1948, was a revelation that won her over to French cooking, and she enrolled at the school the following year.

Which sport did Gordon Ramsay hope to play professionally before injuries ended that ambition?

Football: a serious knee injury ended his hopes as a teenager, so he enrolled at a technical college to study hotel management and found his way into kitchens.

Which chef ran London's Harveys, where Gordon Ramsay trained?

Marco Pierre White handed all three stars back in 1999 and walked away from the stove. He was not the last: in 2017 France's Sébastien Bras asked Michelin to leave his three-star restaurant out of the guide.

Gordon Ramsay, whose Chelsea flagship won its third Michelin star in 2001, was born in which country?

Scotland: he was born in Johnstone, but the family moved to England when he was a child and he was raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare's home town.

Who became head chef of Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in 2007, the first woman to run a three-Michelin-star kitchen in Britain?

Clare Smyth has said she inherited those stars rather than earning them. Her own London restaurant, Core, opened in 2017 and won three of its own in the 2021 guide.

Anthony Bourdain's 2000 bestseller about the restaurant underbelly was titled what?

Kitchen Confidential grew out of an essay he was struggling to publish until his mother, a New York Times copy editor, mentioned it to a colleague married to the editor of The New Yorker.

Which network aired Anthony Bourdain's final series, Parts Unknown?

CNN let him mix food with politics: for a 2016 episode, President Obama joined him for bún chả and a beer at a small restaurant in Hanoi.

Which chef opened Spago on the Sunset Strip in 1982?

Wolfgang Puck made Spago famous for pizzas with toppings such as smoked salmon, and its first pizza chef, Ed LaDou, went on to write the original menu for California Pizza Kitchen.

Paul Bocuse was the face of which cooking movement?

Nouvelle cuisine swapped heavy sauces for lighter dishes and very fresh ingredients. Bocuse said the critic Henri Gault first used the name for food that Bocuse and other chefs prepared for Concorde's maiden flight.

Bocuse created his famous truffle soup in 1975 for which French president, whose initials it bears?

Valéry Giscard d'Estaing had just awarded him the Legion of Honour at the Élysée Palace. The soup, truffles and foie gras in broth baked under a puff-pastry lid, stayed on Bocuse's menu as Soupe V.G.E.

Which chef's restaurants held more Michelin stars than any other chef's when he died in 2018?

Joël Robuchon retired in 1995 at the age of 50, then changed course and staged a comeback, opening restaurants under his name from Las Vegas to Tokyo.

Which chef, sole survivor of a 1984 plane crash, was the first to run three three-Michelin-star restaurants at once?

Alain Ducasse held them in Monaco, Paris and New York in 2005. The next year his company began creating meals for astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

Which Spanish restaurant, open only six months a year, closed in 2011 to become a think-tank?

El Bulli drew hundreds of requests for every table and topped the World's 50 Best list five times, yet it ran at a loss; Ferran Adrià's books and lectures paid the bills.

Ferran Adrià is especially known for popularising which kitchen technique?

Foams were his signature: flavoured liquids aerated with a siphon rather than whipped up with cream or egg white. For all the lab methods, he doesn't call his cooking molecular gastronomy; his own word is 'deconstructed'.

René Redzepi and Claus Meyer opened which Copenhagen restaurant in a harbourside warehouse?

Noma is short for nordisk mad, Danish for 'Nordic food'. The kitchen held itself to ingredients from the region, which sent its cooks out foraging for wild plants.

Massimo Bottura's Osteria Francescana is in which Italian city, Enzo Ferrari's birthplace?

Modena is Bottura's home town too. For Milan's Expo in 2015 he set up the Refettorio Ambrosiano, a community kitchen turning surplus food into meals for people in need, and more have followed around the world.

The French Laundry, the famed restaurant in a former steam laundry, is in which Napa Valley town?

Yountville: the stone building began as a saloon, became a French steam laundry in the 1920s after a local alcohol ban, and was turned into a restaurant in 1978 by the town's mayor and his wife, who kept the name.

In Pixar's Ratatouille, whose motto 'Anyone can cook' inspires Remy the rat to become a chef?

Auguste Gusteau is the late chef Remy idolises. For the film's climactic dish, Pixar had one of America's top chefs adapt confit byaldi, a ratatouille of thin vegetable rounds fanned out like an accordion.

José Andrés founded which non-profit that serves meals after natural disasters?

World Central Kitchen began with his trip to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, where he cooked alongside displaced families in a camp and learned that comfort meant the local dishes people knew.

Which restaurant in Bray, England, was named the world's best in 2005?

The Fat Duck was opened in 1995 by Heston Blumenthal, who is almost entirely self-taught: before it he had worked as a photocopier salesman and a debt collector.

Which unusual dish helped bring Heston Blumenthal to public attention?

Bacon-and-egg ice cream and snail porridge made headlines for his restaurant. He traces his obsession with food to a family holiday at 16, when a meal at a three-star restaurant in Provence left him smitten.

Which chef opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley in 1971, pioneering the farm-to-table movement?

Alice Waters took the idea into schools: in 1995 she planted a garden in the yard of a Berkeley middle school, and the Edible Schoolyard later added a kitchen classroom for its pupils.

Emeril Lagasse succeeded Paul Prudhomme as executive chef of which New Orleans restaurant?

Commander's Palace hired a chef who might have been a drummer: he had turned down a full scholarship to the New England Conservatory of Music, where he was to study percussion, to learn to cook.

Which catchphrase is associated with Emeril Lagasse?

'Kick it up a notch!' even reached orbit: in 2006 NASA sent five of his recipes, jambalaya among them, to the International Space Station, where astronauts said their dulled sense of taste left them longing for spicier food.

Which TV cook wrote nuclear energy budgets at the White House before buying a specialty food shop in the Hamptons?

Ina Garten saw the shop advertised in a newspaper in 1978, made a low offer on impulse and was stunned when the owner accepted the next day. Its name, Barefoot Contessa, has stuck to her ever since.

Which Rachael Ray catchword entered the Oxford American College Dictionary in 2007?

EVOO is her shorthand for extra-virgin olive oil. The dictionary's editor came on her talk show to hand over a framed certificate crediting her with coining it.

Guy Fieri was born with which surname before adopting his grandfather's original Italian name?

Ferry was what his grandfather Giuseppe Fieri made of the family name on leaving Italy for America. Guy took the original spelling back when he married in 1995.

Samin Nosrat's bestselling cookbook and Netflix series name four elements of good cooking: salt, fat, acid and what?

Heat completes the title Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. Nosrat was a Berkeley student when one dinner at Chez Panisse moved her to write the restaurant a letter asking for a job clearing tables, and she worked her way up to the kitchen.

Jamie Oliver first rose to fame with which BBC Two series?

The Naked Chef, where 'naked' meant stripped-down recipes, came about by chance: he was a sous-chef at London's River Café when a documentary filmed there caught him on camera.

Jamie Oliver's restaurant Fifteen, opened in 2002, was set up to do what?

Train disadvantaged young adults as chefs: the first intake of fifteen unemployed trainees gave the restaurant its name, and those who finished the course were offered jobs in its kitchen.

The Michelin Guide, first published in 1900, was created by a company that makes what?

Tyres: with fewer than 3,000 cars on French roads, the Michelin brothers gave the guide away, hoping it would get motorists driving further and wearing out more of them.

What are the Michelin Guide's anonymous restaurant judges officially called?

Inspectors joined in the 1920s, after the guide stopped being a free handout: André Michelin had seen copies propping up a workbench and decided people respect only what they pay for. Stars followed in 1926.

Which food brand began when diners at a Cleveland restaurant kept asking for the owner's sauce to take home?

Chef Boyardee is a phonetic spelling: Hector Boiardi changed it because customers and salesmen kept mangling his surname. In the Second World War his factory turned out field rations for the armed forces.

On the original Japanese Iron Chef, what phrase did Chairman Kaga use to start each battle?

Allez cuisine! was the cry of Chairman Kaga, who was no real gourmet aristocrat: the role was played by Takeshi Kaga, a stage actor who had starred as Jesus in Japan's Jesus Christ Superstar.

Which chef took over as Iron Chef Japanese in 1998 and went on to compete on Iron Chef America?

Masaharu Morimoto fought his most famous battle in New York in 2000: when Bobby Flay climbed onto his cutting board to celebrate, Morimoto said he was 'not a chef', and went on to win.

Long before Julia Child reached television, which cook hosted NBC's I Love to Eat, regarded as America's first TV cooking show?

James Beard had studied voice and theatre and spent years trying to break into acting. Catering began as a way to pay the bills, and the cookbooks and the 1946 show grew out of it.

In The Bear, Carmy returns to Chicago to run his late brother's shop selling what?

Italian beef sandwiches are the trade of Mr. Beef, the real Chicago counter the show's shop is copied from. Its owner is a friend of creator Christopher Storer, and its storefront appears on screen.

In 2018, who became the first woman in the United States to win three Michelin stars for her restaurant?

Dominique Crenn calls her cooking 'poetic culinaria', and at Atelier Crenn in San Francisco the menu is handed over as a poem, each line standing for a dish.

Martha Stewart worked for several years in which profession before starting a catering business in the 1970s?

Stockbroker: she spent years at a small Wall Street firm, which gave a bitter twist to 2004, when she was sent to prison for five months in a case that began with a suspiciously timed stock sale.

Which Los Angeles food-truck pioneer trained Jon Favreau to cook for the 2014 film Chef?

Roy Choi agreed on one condition, that the film get its kitchens right. He sent Favreau to culinary school, then put him to work on the line in his own restaurants.

Which Food Network host was the director of photography on R.E.M.'s 1987 video for 'The One I Love'?

Alton Brown studied film at the University of Georgia, in R.E.M.'s home town of Athens. Years later, tired of directing commercials, he went to culinary school so that he could make a cooking show of his own.

Which chef was awarded three stars in the first Michelin Guide to New York City, in 2005, for Per Se?

Thomas Keller built Per Se as a New York sibling to his Napa Valley flagship. He is also the chef Pixar turned to for Ratatouille: he designed the fanned vegetable dish that wins over the film's critic.

Which fish, marinated in sweet miso, is Nobu Matsuhisa's signature dish?

Black cod in miso made his name. His style took shape in Peru, where he moved at 24 to open a Japanese restaurant and, short of familiar ingredients, began improvising with local ones.

Which film star, a regular at Matsuhisa in Beverly Hills, partnered with Nobu on the first Nobu restaurant?

Robert De Niro first suggested a New York restaurant around 1989 and was turned down. He waited, asked again, and the first Nobu opened in Tribeca in 1994.

David Chang's first restaurant, opened in New York's East Village in 2004, was called what?

Momofuku Noodle Bar was his escape from fine dining, which had left him dissatisfied. The name means 'lucky peach' and, he has written, is an indirect nod to Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant ramen.

In 2007, which chef announced a diagnosis of stage 4 tongue cancer while running Chicago's Alinea?

Grant Achatz chose chemotherapy and radiation at the University of Chicago over surgery on his tongue. The treatment destroyed his sense of taste for a time, and he kept creating dishes he could not taste himself.

Bobby Flay was in the first graduating class, in 1984, of which cooking school?

The French Culinary Institute had only just opened in New York. Flay, a high-school dropout helping in the kitchen at Joe Allen's restaurant, impressed the owner so much that Allen paid his tuition.

Which British cookery writer baked the cake on the cover of the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed?

Delia Smith was an unknown cookery writer when she was asked for 'a gaudy cake' for the sleeve. She went on to sell millions of cookbooks and spent years as joint majority shareholder of Norwich City.

Eric Ripert's New York flagship Le Bernardin is famous for which kind of cooking?

Seafood has been the restaurant's speciality since Gilbert and Maguy Le Coze, siblings from Brittany, opened it in Paris in 1972. They moved it to New York in 1986, and Ripert took over the kitchen when Gilbert died in 1994.

Which bestselling cookbook author wrote a master's thesis on the philosophy of photography before going to cooking school?

Yotam Ottolenghi posted the finished thesis home to Jerusalem in 1997 with a note to his parents buried in the manuscript: he was taking a break from academia to go to cooking school in London.

Daniel Boulud, whose restaurant Daniel opened in New York in 1993, grew up near which French city?

Lyon: Boulud grew up on his family's farm outside the city, knew at 14 that he wanted to cook, and a year later was a finalist in France's contest for best culinary apprentice.