Recipes from a Lifetime in Professional Kitchens
I have spent most of my life in kitchens.
I trained professionally as a chef and went on to cook in restaurants including Louis Szathmáry’s The Bakery in Chicago, the Relais & Châteaux Old Drovers Inn, and Joël Robuchon’s Gastronomie in Paris. In 2003, I opened Pili Pili in Chicago, which was named one of the top ten new restaurants in the world.
I am the author of two cookbooks, *Cuisine of the Sun* and *French Cooking for Beginners*, and I am currently writing my third, *The Table My Mother Set*.
Chef François Recipes grew from a simple idea: take the recipes I have cooked throughout my career and present them in a form that is useful to a home cook.
These are recipes from years spent cooking professionally, teaching, writing, testing, and feeding people. Some began in restaurant kitchens. Others come from the French dishes I grew up with and continue to cook at home.
Each downloadable recipe is designed as something you can actually cook from. Along with the recipe itself, I include the techniques and details that matter, my own photographs, and enough background to explain why the dish is made the way it is. Measurements are given in both U.S. and metric form whenever appropriate.
French cooking is often described as complicated when much of it is really about understanding ingredients, technique, and sequence. My goal is to make those things clear without simplifying the food into something it was never meant to be.
I will continue adding recipes from my cookbooks, restaurant years, family table, and the dishes I still cook regularly.
