Culinary icon Jacques Pepin turns 90, celebrates with 90 parties

The Star

2 days ago

Jacques Pépin couldn't help himself: The buttercream frosting on his strawberry sheet cake looked too luscious. Slicing it for dozens of guests at his birthday party on Saturday, he stuck in his index finger, took a swipe and licked.
'Sorry,' he said, when his daughter, Claudine Pépin, caught him, and scolded with her eyes. (When she wasn't looking, he did it again.)
The guests gathered at Yellowframe Farm, a bucolic estate in Dutchess County, to salute Pépin, the celebrated French chef who has been a mainstay of American cooking for more than half a century, didn't mind his taste test.
It wasn't even his only birthday cake. By the end of the night, there were two rounds of 'Happy Birthday' — and one 'Bon Anniversaire' — and many glasses raised in his honour. Another elaborate fête followed the very next evening.
Jacques Pépin eats cake during one of his 90 birthday parties to celebrate his 90th birthday, at Yellowframe Farm in Millbrook, N.Y., July 19, 2025. The beloved chef, who brought French cooking skills to the American masses, is celebrating his upcoming birthday with 90 parties around the country. (Lauren Lancaster/The New York Times)
Pépin is turning 90 this year, on Dec 18, and to mark the milestone the Jacques Pépin Foundation has helped orchestrate 90 birthday parties, all around the country, at temples of gastronomy like the French Laundry, Restaurant Daniel and Gabriel Kreuther, but also at the local Irish pub near his home in Madison, Connecticut.
The enthusiasm surprised Pépin, who was never big on birthdays. On the eve of a to-do in Washington, D.C., for his 80th, he had a minor stroke. He recovered quickly, and even tried to attend (his family nixed that idea). Now, at his age, 'certainly I am celebrating a lot more than I ever did,' he said.
Fine dining chefs, gourmands and students — home cooks, too — all leaped at the chance to honour Pépin, who began his formal training at 13, and whose career is unparalleled in the food world.
He fed numerous heads of state as the personal chef to French presidents, including Charles de Gaulle, and redefined mass dining with the Howard Johnson hotel chain. With his foundational photo-laden text 'La Technique,' in 1976, he made French culinary expertise accessible for amateurs and professionals alike; two decades later, he demystified sauces and deboned chicken for TV audiences, often alongside his friend Julia Child on PBS.
Pépin plays pétanque during one of his 90 birthday parties.
'Jacques introduced us to many of the classical French dishes, but with simplified preparation,' said Martha Stewart, who cooked with both of them. 'I consider him the male counterpart to Julia.'
He has won 16 James Beard awards and, by his family's count, published 8,000 recipes; a new cookbook, his 35th, is coming in September, illustrated with his own paintings. After starting during the pandemic, he has continued making short cooking videos for his nearly two million Facebook followers.
And though his life was upended by the death, in 2020, of his wife of 54 years, Gloria Pépin, and this year, of his closest friend, chef Jean-Claude Szurdak, in his ninth decade Pépin is still full of charm, jokes and joie de vivre (helped, he might be the first to say, by his 300 bottle wine cellar).
'He really celebrates beauty — mostly culinary beauty — every day,' said Rick Bayless, the Chicago chef, fellow TV star and a longtime friend of Pépin's. 'And he makes space in his life for creativity.'
A guest with a French 75 cocktail — renamed the 'Jacques 90' for the night — during one of Jacques Pépin's 90 birthday parties.
Bayless, who did dinner number 51 of 90, an intimate (and high priced) Mexican market meal at his home, called Pépin 'the best culinary technician in the world.'
'The way that he could imagine flavours told me that he had an encyclopedic knowledge of possibilities,' Bayless said. 'It comes from a deep love of what he's doing.'
Guests streamed to him, to pay their respects, get their grandmother's copy of his cookbooks signed, snap selfies and gab about dinner. Food writer Raymond Sokolov, who was the New York Times restaurant critic in the 1970s, recalled meeting Pépin in 1971, when he was 'making cucumbers do tricks' in a sauté pan. Chef Terrance Brennan was one of many who called Pépin a continuing inspiration: 'We're all just kind of catching up.'
The events benefit his foundation, started in 2016 to promote food education and support community kitchens nationwide. Rollie Wesen, the executive director and Pépin's son-in-law, said the '90/90' campaign has resulted in its busiest year, doubling revenue. With 35 parties still to come, it has raised nearly $1 million, he said. On Saturday, Barbara Tober, the owner of Yellowframe Farm, and a philanthropist, art patron and former magazine editor, donated US$25,000 (RM106,000).
An appetizer of scallops and caviar is served during one ofPépin's 90 birthday parties.
As her horses whinnied in the background, the birthday boy spent the afternoon clinking coupes of a 'Jacques 90' — a rechristened French 75 cocktail — and sampling Provençal-themed hors d'oeuvres, before sitting for a four-course dinner. The menu, illustrated with florals and butterflies by Pépin, included sea scallops and caviar, roasted veal with a chive cream sauce, and a 1999 Chateau d'Yquem Sauternes as digestif.
He hit it off with another guest, Philippe Petit, the French high wire artist. Meeting for the first time, they marveled in French about how they almost intersected at Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the World Trade Center, which Pépin helped open; Petit became a regular after his unauthourised tightrope crossing between the buildings, in 1974.
On a course set up in the horse riding rink, the men played pétanque, the French lawn game Pépin has loved since his boyhood near Lyon.
The chef Brandon Chrostowski, left, offers the chef Jacques Pépin a selection of oysters outside the kitchen during one of Pépin's 90 birthday parties.
He competes weekly as part of a league in Madison, which hosts its own seasonal bacchanals. At the last one, a seated dinner for 50 at his home a week or so ago, 'we had a lot of good stuff,' he said, including a whole roast lamb; 'caviar, of course; crab cakes; brandade.' The competition is convivial, especially because 'we almost drank a hundred bottle of wine.'
'So yes,' he added with a distinct twinkle, in a video interview with the Times a few days before the Yellowframe party. 'My life could be worse, you know.'
In the residential kitchen of the farm's guesthouse, chef Brandon Chrostowski led a team of mostly newbies, some of them shucking oysters and slicing foie gras for the first time.
His Cleveland restaurant, Edwins, was both host of an earlier birthday dinner and a beneficiary of the foundation; he trains and hires formerly incarcerated people for the hospitality industry. (He was also for many years Tober's personal chef.)
The beloved chef, Pepin, who brought French cooking skills to the American masses, is celebrating his upcoming birthday with 90 parties around the country. — New York Times
On Friday, just as he was in Manhattan picking up ingredients, he learned that his wife, Catana Chrostowski, was in labour with their fifth child. He flew home, met his new son, then drove through the night to finish the meal at Yellowframe.
The dedication paid off. Pépin requested a spoon for the celadon-colored sauce in the scallop dish, licking the back of it clean. In his toast, he talked about the connective power of cooking.
'You bring people into the kitchen, and you can redo a life,' he said.
Long after the other guests departed, and Tober had gone to sleep, Pépin was still kibitzing and taking photos with the beaming young chefs. He didn't make it home until the wee hours. He is, it turns out, always the last one to leave a party. –©.2025 The New York Times Company