Pierre Koffmann

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Pierre Koffmann (born 21 August 1948) is a British professional chef.

He was one of a handful of chefs in the United Kingdom to have been awarded the coveted three Michelin stars at his restaurant La Tante Claire in London.

Until December 2016 he was the head chef of Koffmann's at The Berkeley hotel in Knightsbridge, London.

Early life

Koffmann was born in Tarbes, France, on 21 August 1948. He is of Alsatian German ancestry from his paternal side. His father worked as a mechanic for Citroën. It was with his maternal grandparents, Camille and Marcel, in Saint-Puy that he learnt how to cook when he visited with them during school holidays. Koffmann reminisced about this period in his 1990 book Memories of Gascony, and discussed it in an interview with The Guardian in 2010: "The produce was mostly from the farm. Steak was rare; we ate a lot of poultry. My grandmother did own a cooker, but most of her work was done over an open fire." In 1963 he left school and applied for a variety of jobs, but ultimately decided to attend cookery school for the next three years.

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Career

Koffmann began as a chef in Strasbourg and Toulon before heading to the United Kingdom in 1970 to work with Michel and Albert Roux at Le Gavroche. He had only intended to leave the United Kingdom in order to watch England play France at Twickenham Stadium. In 1972, he joined the Roux brothers' Waterside Inn in Bray, Berkshire, becoming the first head chef of the restaurant, where he met his future wife Annie, who was the restaurant's manager.

In 1977 in Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea, he opened La Tante Claire, his first restaurant. The restaurant welcomed its third Michelin star six years since it opened. In 1998, La Tante Claire opened the Berkeley hotel in Knightsbridge, London, with the former site being sold to become Gordon Ramsay's flagship restaurant. During his time at La Tante Claire, Koffmann worked with many well-known chefs, including Ramsay, Marco Pierre White, Marcus Wareing, and Tom Kitchin. Wareing did not get to know Koffmann, who expressed his reservations about him in Simon Wright's book Tough Cookies, and Koffmann said of him, "Threee chefs! This guy didn't tell you anything. He didn't tell you what the lunch menu was like, but he didn't tell you where to find anything; I didn't know if you were coming or going. "Koffmann is a complete thoroughbred," Wareing says of him. He operated the kitchen from the stove." The restaurant's signature dish was pig's trotter with chicken mousseline, sweetbreads, and morels. Marco Pierre White has described this dish as his "favourite dish of all time."

He closed La Tante Claire in 2003 after his wife Annie's death. Marcus Wareing's flagship restaurant was located in the space. He was briefly head chef at the Bleeding Heart restaurant in Clerkenwell after taking a break from restaurants. As part of the London food festival in 2009, he opened Selfridges in London for ten days. As he originally planned, he decided to serve classic dishes from La Tante Claire rather than new dishes – "that's not what people want." They like the pig's trotter, foie gras, and the pistachio soufflé. However, as a special, I might make a new dish every day. Two months later, the ten days turned into two months. "The first month was a kind of hell," Koffmann described, but he returned to the hours during the second month and began to consider the opening of a new restaurant; "I started to think about a new restaurant."

I thought: why not?

I still love it. "Your kitchen is where you are a chef."

Koffmann's at the Berkeley hotel opened on June 30th, 2010 at the former site of Gordon Ramsay's Boxwood Cafe; it was Koffmann's first full restaurant venture since the closure of La Tante Claire in 2003 at the same hotel. He said he was no longer chasing Michelin stars and would instead prepare the Gascon style dishes he remembered from his childhood.

The Berkeley of Koffmann has ceased operations on December 31, 2016. It was supposed that a gym would take its place.

Richard Vines, the former Chief Food Critic at Bloomberg, launched koffmannandvines.com in 2021.

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