Thursday, May 18, 7:00 pm
Members $125, guests $155

Restaurants named after chefs is no new phenomenon. But Jean-Marie Lacroix has worked his entire career to earn the title of eponymous chef—and as anyone who has ever dined at Lacroix at the Rittenhouse will tell you, that title is well deserved. In fact, diners at Lacroix consider themselves lucky to be experiencing such culinary genius at all. Five years ago, after eighteen years serving exquisite French cuisine at the Four Seasons Philadelphia—and five days after taking home our Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic award—Lacroix announced his retirement.

When the Rittenhouse Hotel caught wind that Lacroix was trading the mad crush of the kitchen for the solitary hum of his garden, they jumped at the opportunity to woo the internationally acclaimed chef back into the kitchen. The hotel offered Lacroix the restaurant of his dreams—a lavish two-story establishment serving modestly priced, imaginative fare and excelling, as Clarissa Hyman of Food and Travel wrote, in “polish and subtle precision.” Since opening the doors of Lacroix in 2002, the chef has proven once and for all that he is still at the top of his game. In November 2003, Esquire’s John Mariani deemed Lacroix at the Rittenhouse the Restaurant of the Year, describing the chef’s cooking as “some of the most unexpected and exuberant food in the country”; and in 2004, Gourmet put the restaurant on their list of the World’s Best Hotel Dining Rooms.

Born in Epinal, France, Lacroix trained at Thonon-les-Bains on Lake Geneva and throughout Europe before landing the executive chef gig at Montreal’s Four Seasons Hotel. As executive chef at the Four Seasons Philadelphia’s Fountain Restaurant, Lacroix earned a four-star review from the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Craig LaBan, and the restaurant received more awards and accolades than we could possibly print on this page. Lacroix is a winner of the Robert Mondavi Award for Culinary Excellence and a member of Maîtres Cuisiniers de France. He has mentored a generation of Philadelphia chefs, and the list of his protégées includes stars such as Bruce Lim, Francesco Martorella, and Jean-François Taquet.

After so many years and with so many accomplishments, no one would have blamed Lacroix for sticking to his retirement plan. Luckily for us, he couldn’t stay out of the kitchen.