In memory of Bertrand Grébaut, who loved cooking and his family more than any accolade.

Bertrand had one star. He spent fifteen years in the World’s 50 Best list anyway. Septime was always full. He never promoted himself, never became a presenter, never turned himself into the show. He loved two things, the food and the people close to him, and he never needed a third. He cooked. That was the whole of it, and it was enough.

After I published my piece on his death, my inbox filled with messages from chefs from around the world. Some of the biggest names in the profession wrote to say how sad they were, that he was one of the finest chefs who ever lived, that his influence on cooks everywhere ran deeper than most people outside the kitchen will ever understand. A chef who never chased any of it was mourned by all, also by the people who chase all of it, and they were not mourning a brand. They were mourning a cook.

I have spent nearly twenty years doing the other half of that equation. Chefs need PR. Without it, brilliant cooking happens in a room nobody knows to walk into. There is no shame in wanting to be found. The problem is not visibility, the problem is what happens to a chef when the wish to be seen grows louder than the wish to create.

I have watched it happen. A chef decides he understands his own story better than anyone else, so he starts telling it himself. He invites and hosts the journalists, he manages the narrative, he steps in front of the camera. None of this is cooking, and all of it takes the place of cooking. The kitchen does not empty out overnight, it thins. He is there less, and when he is there, part of him is somewhere else, thinking about how the last piece read, planning the next appearance.

The food knows before the critics do.

There is a word for what changes, and it is not ambition. Ambition is good. Ambition is an obsessive chef who cannot leave a dish alone until it is right, who tastes it forty times, who throws out a year of work because he has found something better. That kind of hunger points at the plate. The trouble starts when the hunger turns and points at the chef himself. When what he wants is not a better dish but to be better known than the chef beside him. That is not ambition. That is ego, and ego cooks nothing.

The two look similar from outside. Both produce drive, energy, long hours. But they pull in opposite directions. The ambitious chef gets better because getting better is the point. The chef running on ego gets busier, more visible, more talked about, and somewhere in all that noise the cooking stops moving forward. He is no longer chasing the dish. He is chasing the reaction to the dish, and those are not the same thing.

Grébaut chased the dish. He broke rules in the kitchen and earned the respect of other chefs for it, the people who actually know how hard the work is and can tell the difference between a chef doing something for the food and a chef doing it for a write-up. That respect does not come from a camera. It comes from the plate, and only from the plate.

I am not arguing that chefs should hide. I make my living making sure they do not. I am arguing that there is a division of labour for a reason. The chef’s passion is for creating the food you have never tasted before. Someone else should carry the passion for spreading the word. When those two things stay separate, both are done well. When the chef decides to do both, the PR gets done, but the obsession in the kitchen is what quietly slips. And the kitchen is the first to suffer, because it is the part he can step back from without anyone outside the restaurant noticing right away.

Until they notice. They always notice.

The real cost is not the meal that went out slightly worse on a night the chef was filming. The real cost is slower and harder to see. A chef divided between two jobs cannot give himself to either one completely, and cooking is the one that needs lots of him. A chef who is busy being watched stops evolving. He stops taking the risk that might fail, because failure is more visible now, and visibility has become the thing he protects. He repeats what worked, he coasts on what made him famous. The curiosity that made him worth watching in the first place goes quiet because attention has replaced it as the thing that gets him out of bed.

That is what I think about when I think about Bertrand. Not the star, not the list, not the sold-out room. The fact that he never stopped moving forward. He cooked because he wanted to cook, right up until he could not, and everything else, the respect, the recognition, the fifteen years, came to him because he was not looking for it.

When the desire to be seen grows stronger than the desire to create, a chef stops evolving. That is the real loss. Not the plate nobody promoted, but the ideas he stopped chasing because he was too busy being watched.

PS. I know some of you have told me you need time before going back to Paris, that it will not be the same without him. I understand that. But think about how much support Bertrand’s family and his team need right now. Book Septime. Go when you can. Bertrand deserves that.

Read also https://hautdegamme.net/2026/07/04/for-bertrand-grebaut-the-gentlest-revolutionary-in-paris/

Andreja Lajh is the founder of Haut de Gamme, a London-based agency working with chefs, restaurants and food producers worldwide. She writes about food, wine and the restaurant world at hautdegamme.net.