Jacques Pépin (French pronunciation: [ʒak pepɛ̃]; born December 18, 1935) is a French chef, author, culinary educator, television personality, and artist. After having been the personal chef of French president Charles de Gaulle, he moved to the US in 1959. He worked in New York's top French restaurants and took a culinary development job with Howard Johnson's. Pépin has appeared on American television and authored more than 30 cookbooks, some of which have become best sellers. He was a longtime friend of the American chef Julia Child, and their 1999 PBS series Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home won a Daytime Emmy Award.
Pépin has been honored with 24 James Beard Foundation Award nominations and 16 awards, the American Public Television lifetime achievement award, the Emmy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2019, the Julia Child Award in 2015, and the Légion d'honneur, France's highest order of merit, in 2004.
Since 1989, Pépin has taught in the Culinary Arts Program at Boston University and served as dean of special programs at the International Culinary Center in New York City. In 2016, with his daughter, Claudine Pépin and his son-in-law, Rollie Wesen, Pépin created the Jacques Pépin Foundation to create culinary education opportunities, particularly for workforce development for adults with barriers to employment. He has lived in Connecticut since 1975.
Pépin was born in 1935 in Bourg-en-Bresse, France. He was the second of three sons born to Jeannette and Jean-Victor Pépin. After World War II, his parents opened a restaurant called Le Pélican, where Pépin worked as a child, and later became known for his love of food.
At the age of 13, he started his apprenticeship at Le Grand Hôtel de l'Europe in Bourg-en-Bresse.
Pépin achieved his university education in his 30s, after his move to the United States in 1959. He enrolled in English for foreign students, a GED equivalent, and eventually General Studies classes toward a Bachelor of Arts degree at Columbia University. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in 1970 from Columbia University's School of General Studies, and in 1972, his Master of Arts in French Literature from the Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. He entered into a doctoral program at Columbia, but his proposed thesis on French food in literature was rejected for being too frivolous for serious academic pursuit.
At age 16, Pépin worked in Paris, training under Lucien Diat at the Plaza Athénée. From 1956 to 1958, during his military service, he was recognized for his culinary training and skill and was ordered to work in the Office of the Treasury, where he met his long-time cooking partner, Jean-Claude Szurdak, and eventually became the personal chef to three French heads of state, including Charles de Gaulle.
In 1959, Pépin went to the United States to work at the restaurant Le Pavillon. Soon after his arrival, The New York Times's food editor Craig Claiborne introduced him to James Beard and Helen McCully. McCully introduced him to Julia Child, who became a lifelong friend and collaborator. In 1961, after Pépin had declined an offer from John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy to serve as chef at the White House, Howard Johnson, a regular Le Pavillon customer, hired him to work alongside fellow Frenchman Pierre Franey to develop food lines for his chain of Howard Johnson's restaurants, where Pépin served as the director of research and development.
In 1970, Pépin opened a specialty soup restaurant and lunch counter on Manhattan's 5th Avenue called La Potagerie, and began to enjoy popular success with appearances on talk shows such as What's My Line? and To Tell the Truth. His career as a restaurant chef ended abruptly with a near fatal car accident in 1974.
After a car accident which damaged his left arm, Pépin began working as an educator, author and eventually television personality. Pépin worked as a consultant for restaurateur Joe Baum on his Windows on the World project, and offered classes at small cooking schools and cookware shops around the United States. In 1976, Pépin authored his cookbook La Technique, followed by La Méthode in 1979. The use of thousands of photographs illustrating techniques and methods. The books are credited by chef Tom Colicchio and others as helping them to learn the craft of cooking.
In 1982, along with Alain Sailhac and André Soltner, Pépin was invited by Dorothy Cann Hamilton to become one of the deans at the newly formed French Culinary Institute, in New York City, now known as the International Culinary Center (ICC). Also in 1982, he filmed his first television series, with PBS local station WJCT-TV in Jacksonville, Florida, and published a companion cookbook entitled Everyday Cooking with Jacques Pépin. Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, Pépin was published as a columnist for The New York Times, and a guest author for Gourmet and Food & Wine. He authored several more cookbooks, including The Art of Cooking, volumes 1 and 2, and The Short-Cut Cook.
In 1989, Pépin partnered with Julia Child and Rebecca Alssid to create a culinary certificate program within the Metropolitan College at Boston University (BU). This effort eventually led to the first, and still one of the few, master's degrees in Gastronomy. Pépin's 1991 television series Today’s Gourmet, filmed at KQED studios in San Francisco was created from recipes from several books, brought together in the companion cookbook Jacques Pépin's Table. In 1994 and 1996, Pépin and Julia Child appeared in 90 minute PBS specials, Cooking In Concert and More Cooking In Concert, filmed live before a Boston audience as part of the PBS annual fund drives for those years. In 1996, Pépin introduced his then 27-year-old daughter Claudine, in three television series and companion books: Cooking with Claudine, Encore with Claudine and Jacques Pépin Celebrates. Each of the three series earned the pair James Beard Foundation Awards. In 1999, Pépin teamed up with Julia Child for the series and companion book Jacques and Julia Cooking at Home. The TV series, produced by Susie Heller, won a Daytime Emmy Award and a James Beard Foundation Award. In 2003, Pépin published his autobiography, The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen.
Pépin has toured and taught on cruise ships including the Queen Elizabeth 2, and the Crystal Cruises and Princess Cruises lines. In 2003, he was named the executive culinary director of Oceania Cruises, and "is credited with helping it achieve its reputation for culinary excellence and style".
Since his time as a student, Pépin has dabbled in and enjoyed drawing and painting. In recent years, he has committed more time to his art, and enjoyed some success with commercial sales on his art website and juried shows. In the first decade of the 2000s, Pépin published several more cookbooks including Fast Food My Way and More Fast Food My Way, which were paired with television series of the same name, produced by Tina Salter, and Chez Jacques: Traditions and Rituals of a Cook, that significantly featured Pépin's art. In 2011, Pépin filmed the series Essential Pépin at KQED studios and published a companion cookbook with more than 700 recipes and a set of technique-oriented videos. In 2012, he published New Complete Techniques, which combined and updated his important earlier works La Technique and La Méthode.
In 2015 Pépin, recovered at his home in Connecticut after suffering a minor stroke. He canceled his appearance at the annual International Association of Culinary Professionals conference in Washington D.C., but otherwise insisted on returning to his normal schedule, according to the Associated Press. "Oh my god, he made soup this morning", Pépin's daughter Claudine told the Associated Press. "I will do my best to lighten the load, but he's not of the mind to cancel anything. Honestly, he wanted to go to IACP. He's like, 'I'm talking. I can walk. Let's go.'"
In 2016, with his daughter Claudine and son-in-law Rollie Wesen, Jacques created his eponymous, non-profit, organization the Jacques Pépin Foundation (JPF):