Today We Celebrate Jacques Pépin at 90

Celebrating Jacques Pépin at 90, a personal reflection and highlights from our interview, with the full feature launching tomorrow on AuthenticFood.com!

Today, Jacques Pépin turns 90!

That sentence alone feels almost impossible to write…not because of the number, but because Jacques exists outside of time for me. His hands still move with quiet precision. His voice still carries calm authority. His ideas about food feel, if anything, more urgent now than ever.

Tomorrow, we’ll be publishing the full interview and feature on AuthenticFood.com, but today felt like the right moment to pause here, with this community, and reflect on what it’s been like to witness this milestone up close.

Earlier this year, I also had the chance to chat with Jacques at Craft Restaurant in New York, where Tom Colicchio was cooking for one of the Jacques Pépin Foundation’s 90 for 90 dinners , a series of dinners across the country celebrating Jacques’s 90th birthday while supporting culinary education. Being in that room felt less like attending a gala and more like being welcomed into a living lineage of American food culture.

Since then, I’ve followed the celebration wherever I could. I attended another 90/90 dinner at the Charleston Wine & Food Festival, surrounded by extraordinary chefs who were there not for attention, but out of reverence. Watching chefs like Areta Ettarh of Gramercy Tavern cook in honor of Jacques made something very clear: his influence isn’t abstract. It lives in technique, in restraint, in respect.

A few weeks ago, I was back in New York again for the 89th dinner, a reminder that this celebration was never meant to be a single moment. It’s a rolling, collective expression of gratitude that will continue for generations.

As a sociologist who focuses on interviews, I’m trained to listen for depth, for how people make meaning across time, how memory, craft, and identity accumulate and intersect. This interview was especially meaningful to me because it was so rich in that depth. Every answer carried layers of history and reflection. There was no performance, no simplification. Just a lifetime of thinking, cooking, teaching, and paying attention.

When asked about what authenticity in food really means, his answer was direct:

“Authenticity for me means really a respect of ingredients. The quality of an ingredient, fresh, unadorned, untouched — straight out of a garden.”

He spoke about how a recipe is a moment in time, that you can cook the same dish again and again, with the same technique, and it will never be identical. Weather, mood, the fat in the chicken, the cook themselves, it ALL matters. Authenticity, in Jacques’s world, isn’t about rigidity. It’s about presence.

He also talked about touch and about needing to feel food with his hands, to listen to it as it cooks, to truly understand it. And when we spoke about turning 90, there was no grand declaration. Just a gentle shift toward simplicity:

“As you get older your tastes change. You look more for simplicity without too much embellishment.”

A tomato with oil and salt. Good bread with butter. Food as connection, not spectacle.

The full article launching tomorrow on AuthenticFood.com explores these ideas more deeply, authenticity, technique, memory, and legacy, and why the mission of the Jacques Pépin Foundation matters so profoundly. As Jacques told me, teaching technique gives people freedom: to cook well for themselves, to nourish others, to build confidence and community through food.

Watching Jacques Pépin be celebrated at 90 isn’t about honoring the past. It’s about recognizing how much of our present and future he has truly shaped.

And for me, as a sociologist, this interview was a reminder that food and authenticity lives not in perfection, but in the relationships we build, the skills we pass on, and the care we take with one another.

Happy 90th, Jacques!

Sign his birthday card HERE!

Full interview and feature launching tomorrow on AuthenticFood.com.