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Hubert Keller has been cooking in San Francisco since the middle of the 1980s when he moved to California to work at Sutter 500, under the aegis of renown French chef, Roger Verge. By 1986, Chef Keller had joined forces with Maurice Rouas as co-owner of Fleur de Lys Restaurant, which remains one of San Francisco’s legendary eateries that puts the city on the map as a culinary mecca. The restaurant has received just about every accolade possible, and the chef’s cooking led food writer John Mariani to say in Esquire Magazine that “Fleur de Lys is my pick as Restaurant of the Year,” and Bryan Miller, writing for the New York Times, to call it “Arguably the top French dining room in the city.”

Chef Keller was born in Alsace, France, and from an early age trained to be a classic French chef, first attending the Ecole Hoteliere in Strasbourg and then apprenticing at the Auberge de L'Ill in Illhaeusern run by the Haeberlin Brothers. He next trained with Paul Bocuse, near Lyon and with Gaston Lenotre in Paris. Finally — and not surprisingly considering his culinary journey thus far — he found himself in the kitchen at  Moulin de Mougins in the South of France, where Chef Roger Verge appointed him chef saucier. After a time, he continued on to the Hotel Negresco in Nice and the Hotel Prieure in Saumur to broaden his experience — until the day Chef Verge contacted him about a job at Verge’s restaurant in Sao Paulo, Brazil, called La Cuisine du Soliel. Chef Keller was off to exotic Brazil, where he discovered the vibrant cooking of that country. From there, his mentor lured him to San Franciso, where he now calls home.

Today, Chef Keller is known as one of the best chefs in the country. He opened a second Fleur de Lys in Las Vegas, where he also owns the Burger Bar. He launched another Burger Bar in St. Louis, where he also established his latest venture, SLeeK Steakhouse and Ultra Lounge.

Chef Keller’s influence extends beyond his restaurant kitchen to the millions of people he reaches through his cookbooks and PBS-Television show, Secrets of a Chef. He is the author of The Cuisine of Hubert Keller and Burger Bar: Build Your Own Ultimate Burgers.

As passionate as the chef is about French cooking, he is equally zealous about making burgers right. Otherwise, he says, the burger experience will be far less than it should be. As he said in an interview with Burger Business, “My chef, Laurent Pillard, and all of us are French. We probably hadn’t eaten more than five burgers before we got into it. We ate burgers all over the place…. After checking them all out, we said, if we do a burger restaurant, we have to do the best burger we can.”

Did You Know?
Chef Keller was the first guest chef ever invited to the White House, where he cooked for President Bill Clinton, his wife Hillary and daughter Chelsea. He was invited to prepare a low-fat meal based on his contributions to Dr. Dean Ornish’s book, Eat More, Weigh Less.

Chef Keller is competing for the Make-a-Wish Foundation

 

Competing for: Make-A-Wish Foundation

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