Auguste Escoffier

Escoffier has been hailed AS the king of chefs and the chef of kings. He was the undisputed culinary leader in the thirty years before World War I, when crowned heads, led by the Prince of Wales, toured the fashionable resorts of Europe accompanied by the beauties of the day, and when the Wagons-Lits company ran a winter service from St Petersburg to Cannes. Escoffier was also the chef of chefs, redefining French cooking by reducing to essentials the elaborate structure of haute cuisine inherited from Carême.