One of the most influential chef-restaurateurs of all time reflects on a career defined by surprising, delicious food.

Jean-Georges Vongerichten was born into a coal-business family in rural Alsace. He didn’t enroll at a top culinary program. He was kicked out of high school at age fifteen. How, then, did he find himself apprenticing with the most renowned chefs, opening restaurants across the world, and cementing his legacy in the New York City food scene?

JGV is Vongerichten’s passionate answer, his life and the recipes that moved him. With humor and heart, he opens up as never before, telling the story of his mother’s goose stew, enlivened with a coffee slurry, and of his first taste of tom yum kung soup, served hot at a stand off a Bangkok highway. Every story is full of wisdom, conveyed with the magnanimity and precision that has made this chef’s name.

With old handwritten menus and black-and-white photographs throughout, this is a book for young chefs, as well as anyone who has stood at a stove and wondered what might be.