Award-winning chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, author of four cookbooks, whose restaurant achievements include venues in London, Paris and Shanghai, not to mention New York’s three-Michelin-starred Jean Georges restaurant, cooked halibut dinners at the United Nations yesterday evening for three past presidents, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, as well as the current commander-in-chief, Barack Obama, according to Lisa Fickenscher with Crain’s.
Fickenscher reported security was so tight that only chef Vongerichten and an assistant were allowed into the kitchen.
This interesting bit from The New York Times:
[Vongerichten] reigns over a vast and varied empire of more than a dozen restaurants that includes Perry Street, 66, Vong, Jo Jo and Mercer Kitchen and reaches far and wide” Las Vegas, the Bahamas, Shanghai. Mr. Vongerichten grew up in Strasbourg, France, and has said that he always wanted to cook. He once said that the best day of his life was his 16th birthday, when his parents took him to L’Auberge de l’Ill, a Michelin three-star restaurant in Alsace. Later, after refusing to enter his family’s fuel business, he enrolled in hotel school in Strasbourg and worked as an apprentice at L’Auberge de L’Ill for three years.