Life a la Henri: Being the Memories of Henri Charpentier
(Life la Henri is the delightful memoir-with-recipes of He...)
Life la Henri is the delightful memoir-with-recipes of Henri Charpentier, the world's first celebrity chef. First published in 1934, and back in print after nearly six decades, the book traces Henri's career from his days as a scrap of a bellboy on the French Riviera and a quick-witted apprentice in a three-star kitchen (when he invented crepe suzette) to his sailing for New York to open his renowned namesake restaurants that introduced many to the glories of haute cuisine.
Henri Charpentier was a French chef who lived and worked mainly in the United States. During his lifetime, he was known as the inventor of Crêpes Suzette.
Background
Henri Charpentier was born in 1880, in Nice, France, of a 58-year-old lawyer father and a 17-year-old mother, who was the daughter of the Marquis Riboude Guibout. Charpentier's father died in a horse-riding accident three days after his son was born and his mother was killed five years later. Then Henri was taken into the home of a neighboring farmer family. At the age of 10, young Henri deserted the farm life and took his first job, running dishes in the kitchen of a swank hotel on the French Riviera.
Education
Henri Charpentier was a student of such chefs as Georges Auguste Escoffier, Jean Camous, and Cesar Ritz.
Career
Henri Charpentier was a world-famous chef and inventor of Crêpes Suzette. As with many culinary successes, a mistake led to its invention. In 1895, Charpentier, a 14-year old assistant at Monte Carlo's Cafe in Paris, was preparing dessert for the Prince of Wales and his party. Inadvertently, the brandy and Grand Marnier liqueur he put into his crepe pan caught fire and the boy thought he had ruined the Prince's dinner and evening. He decided to taste the burnt sauce for when he did, he tasted something sublime and realized the Prince would not be displeased. The future Edward VII gave the new culinary masterpiece its name in honor of his host's daughter Suzette. Years later, in his autobiography, Charpentier concluded the story on the recipe's origins, saying: "Thus was born and baptized this confection, one taste of which, I really believe, would reform a cannibal into a civilized gentleman."
After working at various restaurants in Europe, including the Savoy in London, in Monte Carlo, the Metropole in Moscow, Vier Jahreszeiten in Munich, and Maxim's in Paris, Henri Charpentier immigrated to the United States with his wife in 1907. After finding a property for sale, they purchased it and turned it into what would become the famous "Original Henri Restaurant & Bar" at 666 Scranton Avenue, Lynbrook, New York. He ran the restaurant for 31 years, until 1938. The little restaurant gained in popularity and became a rendezvous for the rich and famous.
During that time, though, he also tried his hand at restaurants in New York City. His first attempt there seems to had been a restaurant called the "Henri Charpentier" in Rockefeller Center, which lasted for about a year and a half, investing his savings from the Lynbrook restaurant. The restaurant failed, and he lost his savings, owing to a misunderstanding of the financial arrangements with the Rockefeller Centre. He then worked at other restaurants in New York during this period, such as Central Park Casino, and House of Morgan.
Over the next three decades, he opened more United States restaurants and in the process served kings, presidents, moguls, and movie stars. So in 1934, it seemed natural that the celebrity chef published his memoirs. Life a la Henri: Being the Memoirs of Henri Charpentier, coauthored with Boyden Sparkes, serves up Charpentier's life story, together with celebrity anecdotes and actual recipes. 1970 saw the posthumous publication of the long-awaited Henri Charpentier Cookbook: Recipes and Memoirs of the World-famed French Chef who Created Crepes Suzette, a version of the chef's 1945 privately published Food and Finesse; The Bride's Bible. Again Charpentier's writing provided a mix of anecdotes and recipes.
In May 1946, Henri Charpentier started working at a restaurant on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles named "Henri's" after him. He was not the owner. The restaurant introduced Caesar's Salad to the west coast. Charpentier didn't last long at Henri's, because he left after a dispute with the owner about creative freedom. He then tried working at Malibou Lodge, at Lake Malibou, Malibu, California but left in 1948.
In 1948, Charpentier finally settled into his second successful restaurant venture after Lynbrook: a small restaurant owned and run exclusively by him in Redondo Beach, California, 30 miles (48 km) from Hollywood. It was an unfashionable area at the time, but then the restaurant was untypical, too. It was in his living room. The maximum capacity that he could sit and feed was 14, though he preferred dinner parties of 4 to 12. The price of the meal in 1948 was 7 dollars (by 1961, he had raised it a whole dollar to 8 dollars), and demand was so great reservations had to be made at least a year in advance. The actual cooking was done by Mary Kalk, who by 1961 had worked with Charpentier for 22 years.
During his lifetime, Henri Charpentier was known as the inventor of Crêpes Suzette. That is now disputed by some, but without doubt, he was the one to popularize it, and, in the minds of newspaper writers in the United States, that was his signature dish. He served his apprenticeship as a Master Chef in the major dining capitals of Europe. After he opened his own restaurant on Long Island, New York, celebrities of the day were knocking at his door to taste his original dishes. Inundated with requests, many people have to book a table month in advance. Charpentier continued to have great success until his death in 1961, leaving behind a 600-page cookbook, a biography, Life à la Henri, and the memory of a very exciting life. Every year, he received a Christmas card from Britain's Royal Family.
Henri Charpentier was married. He had sons Pierre and Camile Henri Charpentier; grandchildren Edward and Elise Charpentier-Lane. Among Charpentier's European patrons and friends were Queen Victoria, stage actress Sarah Bernhardt, and King Edward VII, for whom, Charpentier claimed, he created Crepes Suzette.
