Mr. Vongerichten grew up in Strasbourg, France, and has said that he always wanted to cook. He once said that the best day of his life was his 16th birthday, when his parents took him to L'Auberge de l'Ill, a Michelin three-star restaurant in Alsace. Later, after refusing to enter his family's fuel business, he enrolled in hotel school in Strasbourg and worked as an apprentice at L'Auberge de L'Ill for three years.
In 1976, in the era of nouvelle cuisine, he cooked at L'Oasis, a Michelin three-star restaurant in La Napoule in the south of France. He worked for a year with the legendary chef Paul Bocuse in Lyons, France. In 1980, he became chef at Normandie, the French dining room of the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, Thailand. Six years later, he moved to New York and opened Lafayette, a French restaurant in the Drake Swissotel. But he soon saw that rich French food was no longer the way to success. So in 1989, he, Phil Suarez and Bob Giraldi, television producers and restaurant investors, started Jo Jo on East 64th Street. The goal was main dishes under $20, and it was his first major success. Next came Vong on East 54th Street, which called on his Asian experience and before long had branches in Mexico City, London and around the world.
Jean Georges, which first opened in 1997, elevated him into the world of four stars. Frank Bruni of The Times said it offers “accessible elegance,” providing “classic French indulgence with a contemporary flair.” The restaurant trades “the richness of traditional French cooking for a different kind of intensity,” he added — it eliminates “thick sauces and embraces oils and broths, preferring them for their lightness and for the way they release their scents, like the perfume of lemon grass that rose from a bath of Asian herbs and seeds around a delicately baked lobster tartine.”
More on him:
http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1628191_1626317_1631930,00.html
http://www.foodandwine.com/articles/wild-things
recipes:
http://www.foodandwine.com/slideshows/jean-georges-vongerichten/1
http://topchefs.chef2chef.net/recipes/vongerichten/
