Culinary Genius and the Artistry of Jacques Pépin

The Peter Michael Foundation was honored to partner with acclaimed chef Jacques Pépin to host the Stars New York experience in 2019 at Wild Ink at Hudson Yards. The restaurant’s talented team did an Asian-inspired take on a traditional Pépin menu. Jacques’s art was featured on the menu, which at the end of the evening, auctioned for $7,000 along with his stained chef’s jacket.

Jacques Pépin, the most beloved French chef in America, has been cooking for seventy years. He is as relevant to today’s culinary culture as he was in the 1990s when PBS first aired the Emmy Award–winning Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home television series from KQED in San Francisco.

Jacques received a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in 2019. He has also won twenty-four James Beard Foundation awards in recognition of his ongoing talents and achievements in the culinary arts, hospitality, and media, and has written thirty-one cookbooks, many of which have become instant best sellers.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, more than one million new fans started following Jacques’s laid-back style of quick cooking tips on Facebook, taped in the kitchen of his Connecticut home.

Jacques is eighty-six years old, and the camera still loves him. Handsome, with a sparkle in his eye and a wit that occasionally leans to the charmingly naughty side, Jacques doesn’t take himself too seriously, which is probably what makes him so lovable.

When it comes to cooking, Jacques has led a very public life. It’s his quieter side that people are just beginning to understand, because in this quiet time, Jacques paints. He says it makes him feel a bit freer.

“I like working with my hands,” Jacques says. And indeed, whether tiling a shower stall, preparing a classic rotisserie chicken, or creating an impressionistic landscape, Jacques feels most comfortable when he’s doing something with his hands. “Certain trades, like cooking, painting, sculpting, being a surgeon, mason, or jeweler, require a great deal of skill and manual dexterity,” he adds.

“In the kitchen, I tend to emphasize the technique of cooking,” Jacques says. “I am much more a technician in cooking than in painting. I’ve never really learned painting in a professional or organized way, and I don’t try to tie it into one style.”

For Jacques, cooking and painting are both similar and different.

After donating some artwork to a charity auction and being stunned by the prices people paid, Jacques began creating limited-edition giclée prints to make the images affordable to more of his fans. His online gallery, The Artistry of Jacques Pépin, is a collection of acrylics, oils, and watercolors in impressionistic and contemporary styles. And then there are his lighthearted chickens, which appear frequently throughout the collection.

In fact, Jacques’s thirty-second book, called The Art of the Chicken, is scheduled to come out September 2022, and combines art, stories, and “kitchen talk” about chickens. It’s not a recipe book, although he touches on the ways his favorite chefs have worked, “like the special way my mother cooked chicken back in our home near Lyon and the different ways Julia [Child) approached her chicken recipes.”