This Legendary Chef Had The Most Ever Michelin Stars

It's one of the foundational pieces of foodie trivia: the Michelin that publishes the annual guide to fancy restaurants and the Michelin that sells tires with a bizarre mascot who looks like a marshmallow are, in fact, one and the same. What started life as a tire company's ploy to encourage road travel eventually became the world's preeminent marker of culinary prestige. After a visit from an undercover inspector, a restaurant may find themselves awarded between one and three stars. One star is very good; two is excellent; three is truly exceptional, reserved for world-class restaurants like The French Laundry or Noma.

To receive even one Michelin star is to be honored as a master chef; it's the culinary equivalent of an Oscar or a Pulitzer. Some of the world's most legendary chefs – your Heston Blumenthals, your Thomas Kellers, your Gordon Ramsays – have many more stars across several different restaurants. (Those chefs currently hold six, seven, and eight Michelin stars, respectively.) And then there's the great Joël Robuchon, who, at the time of his death in 2018, held a whopping 31 Michelin stars – the most of any chef.

The son of a bricklayer, Robuchon briefly considered entering the clergy before getting a job as a pastry chef in his home city of Poitiers at the age of 15. From there, he steadily worked his way up the culinary ladder. He joined a coveted apprenticeship at 21, became the head chef at a Parisian hotel restaurant at 29, and earned his first two Michelin stars in his early thirties (at a different Parisian hotel restaurant).

He opened his first restaurant, Jamin, in 1981, which received three Michelin stars in its first three years of existence. If most other chefs earned five Michelin stars, they could die happy; of course, Joël Robuchon was not like most chefs. He established a namesake restaurant in Las Vegas (three stars), opened over a dozen locations of L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon across the globe (over twenty stars all told), and burnished his reputation to the point where he was declared "Chef of the Century" in 1999 by the French magazine Gault Millau.

Robuchon had a perfectionist streak that was notable even by the sky-high standards of haute cuisine chefs. Eric Ripert, the Michelin-starred chef who learned under the French master at Jamin, described Robuchon as a man who could find fault at a glance and who punished his cooks if a dish came back with even a single bite left uneaten; Gordon Ramsay, another chef mentored by Robuchon, recalled an incident where his arrogant attitude prompted Robuchon to hurl a plate of ravioli at his head.

But that drive towards perfection also encouraged Robuchon to favor simplicity, in ingredients if not in technique; his legendary pommes puree, or mashed potatoes, require only four ingredients but are by no means easy to make. Inspired by his love of Japanese cuisine, Robuchon emphasized the best possible ingredients to be enjoyed in their season, an approach that lives on after his death in restaurants like Las Vegas' Joël Robuchon.