Chef Jean-Louis Palladin Dies of Lung Cancer

Celebrity chef Jean-Louis Palladin lost his long battle with lung cancer this weekend, succumbing on Nov. 25 in McLean, Va. He was 55, but his admirers will no doubt say he got more out of life than most people who live to be far older.

In a 1995 review of the French chef's first U.S. restaurant, Jean-Louis at the Watergate, Wine Spectator editor Thomas Matthews called Palladin "a whirlwind of energy who fills any room he enters." He applied that energy brilliantly throughout his four-decade career (he began working in restaurants at age 12), turning out some of the most creative cooking Americans had ever seen and influencing future culinary leaders who worked under him, such as Daniel Boulud, Eric Ripert and Christian Delouvrier, among others.

Palladin was only 28 when he earned two Michelin stars for La Table des Cordeliers in his Gascony hometown, Condom. He was the first chef ever to be so honored at such a young age, and he became instantly famous in France.

Five years later, he opened at the Watergate Hotel, in Washington, D.C., where in another two years, he would prepare a birthday dinner for President Ronald Reagan that would secure his prestige in the United States. A Wine Spectator Grand Award followed in 1984. The restaurant held on to that distinction until it closed in 1996.

Jean-Louis was the first, and most successful, of Palladin's American endeavors. Others included a chic Las Vegas venture called Napa, a California wine country—style place that is still operating in the Rio Suite Hotel and Casino, and Palladin by Jean-Louis, a more casual spot in the Watergate that celebrated the home cooking of Gascony, where Palladin was born and raised.

"I wanted to prove to everybody and to myself that I can do good cooking with the kind of humble ingredients I learned to cook with when I was young," Palladin told Wine Spectator contributor John Mariani in 1994. "Everybody was saying, 'Well, sure, Jean-Louis can cook with foie gras and truffles, but it's easy to cook with such ingredients.'"

In fact, Palladin had by that time mastered much more than rustic and fine French cuisine. "Palladin has traveled and cooked all over the world," Matthews wrote in 1995, "and everything he's learned is grist for his mill." The chef was as comfortable with seaweed and shoyu as he was with consommés and confits, and his signature international style, firmly based in classic technique, was an inspiration to professionals the world over.

Successful as he was with critics and the public, Palladin never managed to become a wealthy man. In his final months, hundreds of friends raised money to help him meet his health care expenses, holding glittering benefits hosted by some of the nation's top chefs. These were joyous affairs, held in celebration of a glorious life and talent.

For any other dying man, such parties might have seemed inappropriate. But for Jean-Louis Palladin, the right thing to do was raise a glass and savor beautiful food and company.

--Laura Stanley

For more about Jean-Louis Palladin: