I spent twelve years as a student at Columbia. I went from 1959, two or three years of English for foreign students, and eventually went into the regular college. At that time, there was no formal culinary degree. Didn't exist. I got a BA in 1970 and then went on to graduate school. I got my master's in ‘72 in eighteenth-century French literature, and I was working on a PhD, and I had finished the requirements for that, and I wrote my dissertation proposal, but they rejected what I wanted to write about. I had thought about quitting the kitchen and becoming a teacher, a university professor, because I loved literature, so I thought, why not combine the two? And I proposed a doctoral dissertation on the history of French food within the context of civilization and literature starting with the playwrights and poets of the sixteenth century, and they said, “Are you crazy? Food? This is too trivial for academic study….” So it was at that point I had enough. I said, “Fine.”
It's interesting because this is what I teach now at BU [Boston University]. We're offering a master's of liberal arts with a concentration in gastronomy, and this is the class that I have given for several years now. Ironically, two weeks ago, I gave the commencement address at Columbia for graduation, and the president of the university, a friend of mine, introduced me and said, “Considering that Jacques was refused to write his dissertation here because of his subject, which would really be appreciated like now….” So it's true: things have changed. It's another world.
My mother loved it here. Each time she came here she absolutely loved it, and she had her green card even though she wasn't living here. She'd come for three months, sometimes teach a couple of classes here, and each time she had to go back, she had to do a tax assessment. Even with a green card you have to pay your taxes before you leave the country. So each time she would come, it was like a nightmare for her to fill out those papers. She hasn't been here in the last few years. My mother is still alive. I spoke with her yesterday, actually. She was ninety-five a few weeks ago [in 2010].
Le Pavillon was a great restaurant, but for me, with the training I had in France, I didn't think it was that great, frankly. I thought it was good, but I had not worked in any other restaurant here, so I could not really make a comparison. In the spring of 1960, Pierre Franey, who was the executive chef there, had some problems with the owner, Henri Soulé, and it turned out that we all left.
A patron of Le Pavillon was Howard Johnson, the man who created the company, and he told Pierre, “You're going to work for me one day.” So eventually he asked Pierre to go work with him. Pierre had been in this country a long time because he came for the World's Fair in 1939, so he had been here more than twenty years. It was a time when Kennedy clan used to come to Le Pavillon. It was usually led by Joseph P. Kennedy, the father, and then of course everyone else; he was the man running the show. And at that point they came in spring 1960 to discuss the campaign or whatever, and they were always seated at La Royale, which was the best table and most visible one in the restaurant, and at that time a photographer snuck in and started shooting pictures of them. Martin Decré was the maître d of the restaurant, who the Kennedys knew well because they came there almost every week, and Joseph Kennedy said, “Martin, get that guy out of here!”
Soulé was at another table and overheard. Soulé was like Napoleon there. [He laughs.] “Decré You will do no such thing!” Soulé said. Every head in the restaurant turned. “It's only Soulé who decides who stays or who doesn't stay at Le Pavillon,” or something to that effect, some disparaging remark. He said it like, “Who do you think you are? You think you are already in the White House?”
The Kennedy clan left and never returned to Le Pavillon.
So at that point it also happened that the brother of Martin Decré, Fred Decré, was with Robert Meyzin, the general manager of La Cote Basque, which belonged to Soulé too. The two of them left to open Le Caravelle, so that was a big blow to Soulé. Roger Fessaguet, who was the sous chef at Le Pavillon, also left Pavillon to become the executive chef at Le Caravelle. Roger asked me to go with him there, and the whole Kennedy clan moved to Le Caravelle.
So a couple of months after that, Joseph P. Kennedy spoke to Robert Meyzin, now the owner of Le Caravelle, and said they needed a chef at the White House. So Roger Fessaguet, who was the executive chef, called me and said, “You should go there. I gave them your name, and they are looking and they are very interested.”
Meanwhile, Pierre Franey asked me to join him at Howard Johnson's; he needed an assistant. He made an appealing offer, and I said, “I don't know.” Pierre didn't tell me the White House would be a great thing for me, so it didn't really push me to go there, and for me, as I said before, because of the experience that I had in France, having been chef of the “French White House”—where I had never been in a newspaper, television didn't exist [for up-and-coming chefs], it had no bearing on my life. So I said, “I am starting at Howard Johnson's,” which was another world altogether, and I was at Columbia so I really didn't want to go to Washington, DC, and so I said no to the Kennedy job. They called me again a month later. They said they had looked at a couple of other people, and I said no again. With twenty-twenty hindsight you realize the possibility for publicity, but at that time I was totally unaware of it. Also, with Pierre, there was no limit to what we could do. Howard Johnson said we had to approve the food, so we started cutting down the dehydrated onion and put fresh onion, replacing margarine with butter, and started doing things like beef burgundy or whatever, and I started doing five pounds in the kitchen, and then I'd do fifty pounds, and in the kettle outside, two hundred pounds, and eventually three thousand pounds at a time. I worked with two chemists, and that's when I started learning about the chemistry of food about bacteria and quality control and so forth.
During that time, I was going to Columbia, so it was great. I worked at Howard Johnson's from seven o'clock in the morning to three in the afternoon in Queens Village near Jamaica, and then I went to college. I stayed with Pierre Franey for ten years, and then I left to open a restaurant on Fifth Avenue called La Potagerie with a group of investors. And I would not have been able to do that if I hadn't had the training at Howard Johnson's and was doing large production type of things. And then eventually, as a consultant, I set up the commissary at the World Trade Center with Joe Baum [who owned celebrated New York restaurants such as the Four Seasons, the Brasserie, and the Rainbow Room], and again, I would not have been able to do that if I hadn't had the training at Howard Johnson's. Even after, I was a consultant for the Russian Tea Room, the same way too. Howard Johnson's was a long American apprenticeship, but quite valuable for me….
I met Julia Child in 1960 when I was at Le Pavillon. Craig Claiborne came, and he had just started at the New York Times as a food critic. He came to do a piece on Pierre Franey, and I met Craig, and we became good friends right away. I lived on Fiftieth Street. Craig lived on Fifty-Third Street, and he introduced me to Helen McCully, who was the food editor at House Beautiful, and she was very feisty and very well known in this country at that time, and she had never been married, never had kids, so she kind of became my surrogate mother: “Don't wear this, don't do that, do this, do that,” fixing me up with all the girls in the office [laughs], and through Helen I met James Beard, and then in the spring of 1960, Helen told me, “You know, I want you to look at a manuscript.” She showed me a manuscript for a cookbook, and she said, “The author is a woman from California, and she's coming to New York next week. She's a big woman and has a terrible voice. She's going to come, so let's cook for her.” And that was Julia, but no one knew Julia because she had never done a book, so she'd never done television and was totally unknown. But what I want to say [is] within six to eight months after I was here in America, I knew the trinity of cooking, which was James Beard, Craig Claiborne, and Julia Child. So the food world at that time was quite small, extremely small, as opposed to today—it's another world altogether. And certainly the status of the chef, which, at that time, was considered
uninspired and very low on the social scale, but now we are genius! [He laughs heartily.]
It has changed a great deal. In my early days, any good mother would have wanted her child to marry a lawyer or a doctor or an architect, but not a cook! But now, as I said, WOW! We are genius, you know? [He laughs.]
So I knew Julia because of Helen, and I started doing articles for House Beautiful, and then eventually I was asked to do a book, La Technique: An Illustrated Guide to the Fundamental Techniques of Cooking. I had finished at Columbia. I decided not to do my PhD. I didn't know at that time whether I was going to move into academia. Like many of us who are artisans, we have a bit of a complex about not having much of an education. Well, at that time at least, the study I did at Columbia prevented me from having a complex about not having an education. I could see that even at Howard Johnson's. They had college kids who graduated from Cornell [University's school for hotel and restaurant management], and Pierre Franey would be a little bit intimidated by them because they were college graduates, when they knew absolutely nothing about the food world and when Pierre was a much brighter person. But they couldn't do that with me because I had graduated from Columbia and they had absolutely no knowledge of food whatsoever, so it did change my view of many things, and I don't think that I could have done what I did in life if I hadn't studied at Columbia.
In 1974, I had a very bad car accident. I had fourteen fractures. I broke my back, my two hips, my leg, my pelvis. I wasn't supposed to live; I wasn't supposed to walk. So that was certainly a catalyst to start pushing me in the direction of writing about food, and coincidentally, at the time cookware shops with little cooking schools attached to them started opening up all over the country. When I went to the West Coast, I would go to a school for three weeks in San Francisco and another week in Los Angeles and another week in Eureka, California, and then they'd say, “We booked you for next year,” so I had a schedule like that for forty weeks a year, selling books all over the country and doing cooking classes and all that. I was the first. I was there when it started.
So that led to appearances on television, a morning show here and there, and I had already started with Julia on PBS in ‘62 or ‘63 after she did her book Mastering the Art of French Cooking and she said, “I don't want to do it anymore. You should do it.” So I saw some people at WNET in New York, WGBH in Boston, and they wanted to do it. They had to raise money, and I did a couple of shows, and one thing led to another. And eventually I did a series in Jacksonville, Florida, in ‘82 in conjunction with a book, and eventually I started doing them at KQED in San Francisco and have to this day. A series is thirteen shows. Each time we do a double series, or twenty-six shows, which is about 130, 140 recipes, so that's what makes a book. That's why I have so many books: because I do a series with each one. I think we've done something like thirteen series of twenty-six shows for KQED since 1989, I believe. My daughter Claudine and I have also done a bunch of shows together, and we're still doing them.
I hooked up with KQED in San Francisco because they asked me there, and because they raised the money. I'm part of the rostrum there, and that's it. They've always raised the money for me. I mean, if you look at Lidia Bastianich or Ming Tsai or Mario Batali or most of the chefs who are on television now, they are all executive producers of their own shows, but they have to raise the money or get involved in it, and I have never done that. If I had to, I wouldn't know where to start! So they [producers at KQED] raise the money for me, and I don't need to be executive producer because I'm the one who decides on the content of the show anyway. I do the recipes. No one can decide for me what I'm doing. So I am, in a sense, the executive producer, except that I don't have to raise the money, which—if I had to raise it, I would probably never do television again! Why? Because it's another world and I'm not good at that, calling people.
In addition to this, I never went to the Food Channel Network or others, although they asked me several times, because they wanted me to go with them, but they wanted me NOT to be with PBS at the same time, which I didn't like. And Julia and I were very happy with PBS because we don't have to kowtow to the sponsor or endorse any product. In fact, I don't have the right to endorse any product, so that makes it much easier—so I can focus just on being a chef.
What happened was Julia lived in Cambridge in Boston, and she bought a house there in 1949, I believe, so by the time I started teaching at BU, which was in ‘82, each time I would call and see Julia. I would have breakfast at her house or lunch, or we'd go out for dinner at night because she was very good friends with the person in charge of the BU program. So we decided to do a class together at BU, and almost from the beginning, the two of us were onstage doing demonstrations and it was great fun. And at some point I said, “I think we should do a special for PBS,” so we did a thing at BU called “Cooking in Concert,” which was three hours of us cooking on stage with a big audience, maybe five hundred people, which they taped as an hour-and-a-half special for PBS. This was the summer of 1982, and it ended up being one of the most watched cooking shows on television ever. Remember, the Food Channel Network didn't exist yet, so this was great. We continued doing classes together and doing more appearances together, and we said, “Let's do another one.” So two years later we did another “Cooking in Concert” special for PBS, and that was the catalyst or the genesis for the shows with Julia in the midnineties. Julia was around eighty-five at the time.
I was always friends with her, ever since we met in 1960. I mean, we argued all the time [laughs], but we were really good friends. People don't realize. They say, “Were you impressed when you met Julia?” Well, no. When I met Julia she'd never done a show; she hadn't done anything. I remember the first time we met at Helen McCully's, we actually spoke French. Her French was better than her English. She had just arrived from Paris. She had been working there for five years. She went to Le Cordon Bleu. She knew all those chefs in Paris, and she already joked that we started cooking together because she came to Paris in 1949 and I was in apprenticeship in 1949—of course, I was only thirteen years old. In the movie Julie & Julia, the part that related to Paris was really truly the way it was and the way I remember it because it was the same time when I was in apprenticeship that she was in apprenticeship. That's why that show took place from 1949 to 1960, when she did Mastering the Art of French Cooking.…
I am celebrating more than fifty years here. One of the reasons I stayed in America is because I thought the people were so nice—the easiness of life here, as opposed to Europe and the class system there, which was much more strict. People who come to this country come to get a better life, a better economic life, a better job, or because of political reasons or racial reasons or whatever, which was not my case at all. I had a very good job in Paris. I had family. So I didn't come here for a particular social or economic reason. I came here just to see. I loved it, so I stayed.
But America is different than it used to be. At that time, people would tell you how great you were; there was a humility. Now? It's “We are the greatest, we are the best, we are the strongest, and if you're not the greatest, not the best, oh my God, you're not American!” People have become so macho in this country! That did not exist before. People were not macho like that, and I don't know why it turned.
The face of America is quite different, too. I mean the social or the ethnic face of America is different than it was fifty years ago. If I were to advise someone about coming here, I would say the first duty is to learn the language! I came here and I learned the language! I didn't come here to speak Spanish or French or another language. That's kind of ridiculous. The language here is English and I intend to speak English, you know? And if you are here, whether you come from South America or any other place in the world, you should speak English! You don't come here to speak Russian—although people would not because there are not that many Russians or that many French or whatever. But if there are that many Spanish or that many Chinese, and [they] are in a certain enclave area
of the country, you still have to speak English.
I would never move back to France because I'm much more American than French now. When I go there now I feel like I'm in another country, in a way. I feel kind of claustrophobic in Europe. I mean, the scale is different and the mentality is different. After fifty years here, I've become totally American. It would be difficult for me to live there. Contrary to many of my friends, it took them quite a number of years to decide if they were going to stay in this country and retire in France. For me, I have never had that hesitation. I came here and loved it and never wanted to leave….
My greatest pleasure now is cooking with friends. Cooking for the family. It all amounts to this, you know? Enjoying life is this. Like yesterday. Some friends came. We played boules [a game played with metal balls popular in France and Italy] for two hours. We drank five bottles of wine, and we cooked dinner together, and I did that the day before yesterday, too. I did lobster, corn, coleslaw. They did a book a few years ago which was about our last meal, and they asked fifty chefs what their last meal would be, and I said if you have extraordinary bread and extraordinary butter, it's hard to beat bread and butter. [He laughs.]
I don't know if there is one thing in particular I'm more proud of. I can't really think of any big disappointment. I did more or less what I wanted to do, you know? [He pauses.] Life has been good. I have done many things. I have been very lucky in many ways. Certainly, I feel lucky to do what I was able to do—so many books and TV shows. I have done more than I ever dreamed I would do. I love to paint; I even have some of my paintings in a museum. I'm very proud [more softly] of our life together, Gloria and I. We've been married so many years, more than forty years, since 1966, so that's a long time. And my daughter Claudine, I'm proud of her. She can get me crazy; she studied at BU for her BA, and then went for a master's in political science, and then dropped the whole thing and married a chef and gives some cooking classes. They have a child [pauses, smiles], so I'm a grandpa. That's good, too!
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