Remembering Jean-Luc Petitrenaud (1950-2025)

I don’t know anyone outside of France who knows the first thing about Jean-Luc Petitrenaud. I wouldn’t expect a lot otherwise since French is the language in which his legacy resides. As for me, I stumbled across Petitrenaud in 2000, seeing him on the TV in my French house driving around in a red and cream-colored London taxi in “Carte postale gourmande” before his program changed names to “Les Escapades de Petitrenaud”. I would like to think I never missed an episode until it ended eight years ago.

Petitrenaud’s formula never changed. He covered the length and breadth of France town-by-town and city-by-city highlighting primarily chefs preparing their dishes in their restaurants, but also farmers, winemakers; artisans and purveyors in their shops or at the town market, as well as the surroundings in which they lived. However, what I most revere him for was his joie-de-vivre; light touch; quick wit; obvious love of those in the profession; and the way in which he treated everyone equally from the famous chef to the humble storekeeper. In other words, the lightness of his being.

What I am most aware of and affected by is the loss of the joyous and unpretentious way Petitrenaud embraced gastronomy. To an extent greater than some would want, we now get bombarded with the polar opposite by chefs who have run out of the ideas of their profession, clumsily presenting themselves as, with the help of their PR agent, something more than mealmakers, resorting to offering in words what is best described as pap.

Through the miracle and auspices of YouTube, Jean-Luc Petitrenaud’s legacy lives on. You can binge for hours and hours on excerpts and complete programs from the early days until the end. It helps a lot if you understand French. Yet even if you don’t, dip your toe in and remind yourself anew how joyful real food and their creators can be.