My Father the Chef
Jacques Pépin
Jacques Pépin was born in Lyon, France, in 1935 and began working in his family’s restaurant at age thirteen. He was the personal chef for three French heads of state, including Charles de Gaulle; worked at the legendary New York French restaurant Le Pavillon; and served for ten years as the director of research for Howard Johnson’s. As the host of thirteen television shows—including Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home, with Julia Child—Pépin taught much of America how to cook. He is the author of numerous books and has won two Emmys and twenty-four James Beard Foundation awards. He and his wife, Gloria, have one daughter, Claudine.
i feel like papa taught half of America how to make an omelet. He taught me how to make an omelet, too, and also how to walk, ski, and drive (that one was a touch stressful). But one of the most important things he taught me was how to be part of a deep and enduring friendship.
My father was twenty-two when he met twenty-year-old Jean-Claude Szurdak. It was 1957, and Papa was working as the chef for the French president, René Coty. He needed a pastry chef. Jean-Claude appeared at the kitchen door, a tall skinny kid who, as my father put it, “looked like a malnourished poet.” Papa hazed him something terrible for the first twenty minutes, but he soon discovered that Jean-Claude was a well-trained and hardworking cook.
In 1959, my father moved to New York, and Jean-Claude soon followed. My father first worked at Le Pavillon and then as the director of research and development for Howard Johnson’s while earning his master’s degree in French literature at Columbia University. (My father always had an insatiable intellectual curiosity and read voluminously, from Molière to Camus.) Jean-Claude, meanwhile, started his own catering company. As a kid, I called him “Tonton Claude” and his wife “Tati Geneviève”—which is how French children would address their uncle and aunt. They were, and still are, part of our family. I consider their daughters cousins.
My father and Jean-Claude love each other like brothers, even though they sometimes pretend they don’t, and they always take care of each other. Occasionally people assume they’re a couple. They will often walk close together, and there is certainly no one else my father would trust more in the kitchen, or out of it. They’re soul mates.
When I was five or six, Papa got into a terrible car accident while trying to avoid hitting a deer in Upstate New York. He ended up with fourteen fractures. At first, the doctors told my mother he wouldn’t survive. Then they told her he’d survive but would never walk again. I remember at the time looking up at him in the hospital bed that would be his home for many months, and I was scared. Mom was there, of course, but so were Tonton Claude and Tati Geneviève. With their help and his own tenacity, three years later, my father started skiing again, of course in the company of Jean-Claude.
I don’t believe that my father explicitly taught me about friendship. Instead, he spoke of loyalty. Of family. Of commitment. And by watching him and Jean-Claude together, I’ve learned that true friendship means calling your friend out on their bullshit but also, most important, being kind and generous and loyal.
Jacques and Claudine (two years old) at their home in Hunter, New York, 1967