Chef Trivia
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This chef trivia quiz has 100 free questions with answers and covers the people who made cooking famous. It starts with the founders - Carême building sugar palaces for the Tsar, Escoffier borrowing his army experience to invent the kitchen brigade, Fannie Farmer standardising the measuring cup - and moves through the modern greats: Bocuse, Robuchon, Ducasse, Ferran Adrià's foams, Redzepi's foraging and Heston Blumenthal's bacon-and-egg ice cream. The television chefs get a full round of their own: Julia Child's spy-agency past, Gordon Ramsay's football dreams, Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles years, Emeril's 'Bam!', Rachael Ray's EVOO, Ina Garten's job writing nuclear budgets and Guy Fieri's original surname. There are questions on Michelin stars, Iron Chef, Chef Boyardee, The Bear and Ratatouille too, so a home cook and a Food Network devotee can both score. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is marked on every question. Every answer has been checked against a reference page and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word 'chef' reached English as a shortening of which French phrase?
Chef de cuisine
Chef de cuisine, literally 'head of the kitchen'. On its own the French word only means chief or boss, which is why a chef de gare is the person in charge of a railway station.
Q 02Which chef drew on his military service to create the hierarchical kitchen "brigade" system?
Auguste Escoffier
Auguste Escoffier had been an army chef in the Franco-Prussian War. At a time when kitchens were loud and cooks drank on the job, he demanded cleanliness, discipline and silence.
Q 03At which London hotel was Nellie Melba first served the peach dessert named after her?
The Savoy
The Savoy. By its chef's own account, he served peaches and vanilla ice cream on a swan carved from ice, a nod to the opera she was singing; the raspberry purée and the name pêche Melba came later, at the Carlton.
Q 04In a classic kitchen brigade, which station chef prepares cold dishes such as salads, pâtés and terrines?
Garde manger
Garde manger, roughly 'food keeper'. The name comes from the cool larder where food was stored, which is why the cook in charge of it took on the cold dishes prepared there.
Q 05Which chef turned down the Kennedy White House to develop recipes for Howard Johnson's restaurants?
Jacques Pépin
Jacques Pépin had been a chef to President Charles de Gaulle, yet he chose what was then America's largest restaurant chain. He stayed ten years and said the job taught him mass production and American tastes.
Q 06Which chef to Talleyrand and Tsar Alexander I is popularly credited with giving the toque its tall, stiff shape?
Marie-Antoine Carême
Marie-Antoine Carême wanted cooks in white because it looked clean, and is said to have stiffened his own cap with cardboard. Before him, French kitchen staff wore soft stocking caps whose colour showed their rank.
Q 07Which Julia Child cooking series, made at Boston's public television station, aired nationally from 1963 to 1973?
The French Chef
The French Chef grew out of a guest spot on a book-review programme: she cooked an omelette on air, and viewers wrote to the station asking for more.
Q 08Fannie Farmer's 1896 cookbook is credited with standardising which aspect of American recipes?
Measurements
Measurements: she insisted on level cupfuls and spoonfuls so that a recipe came out the same every time. A paralytic stroke at 16 had ended her plans for college, and she took up cooking while recovering.
Q 09Before she became a chef, Julia Child worked for the OSS on a wartime project developing what?
Shark repellent
Shark repellent: curious sharks kept bumping into underwater explosives meant for German U-boats and setting them off, so her OSS section worked on a coating to keep them away.
Q 10Julia Child graduated in 1951 from which famous Paris cooking school?
Le Cordon Bleu
Le Cordon Bleu. Her first meal in France, oysters and sole meunière in Rouen in 1948, was a revelation that won her over to French cooking, and she enrolled at the school the following year.
Q 11Which sport did Gordon Ramsay hope to play professionally before injuries ended that ambition?
Football
Football: a serious knee injury ended his hopes as a teenager, so he enrolled at a technical college to study hotel management and found his way into kitchens.
Q 12Which chef ran London's Harveys, where Gordon Ramsay trained?
Marco Pierre White
Marco Pierre White handed all three stars back in 1999 and walked away from the stove. He was not the last: in 2017 France's Sébastien Bras asked Michelin to leave his three-star restaurant out of the guide.
Q 13Gordon Ramsay, whose Chelsea flagship won its third Michelin star in 2001, was born in which country?
Scotland
Q 21Which chef, sole survivor of a 1984 plane crash, was the first to run three three-Michelin-star restaurants at once?
Alain Ducasse
Alain Ducasse held them in Monaco, Paris and New York in 2005. The next year his company began creating meals for astronauts aboard the International Space Station.
Q 22Which Spanish restaurant, open only six months a year, closed in 2011 to become a think-tank?
El Bulli
El Bulli drew hundreds of requests for every table and topped the World's 50 Best list five times, yet it ran at a loss; Ferran Adrià's books and lectures paid the bills.
Q 23Ferran Adrià is especially known for popularising which kitchen technique?
Foams
Scotland: he was born in Johnstone, but the family moved to England when he was a child and he was raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare's home town.
Q 14Who became head chef of Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in 2007, the first woman to run a three-Michelin-star kitchen in Britain?
Clare Smyth
Clare Smyth has said she inherited those stars rather than earning them. Her own London restaurant, Core, opened in 2017 and won three of its own in the 2021 guide.
Q 15Anthony Bourdain's 2000 bestseller about the restaurant underbelly was titled what?
Kitchen Confidential
Kitchen Confidential grew out of an essay he was struggling to publish until his mother, a New York Times copy editor, mentioned it to a colleague married to the editor of The New Yorker.
Q 16Which network aired Anthony Bourdain's final series, Parts Unknown?
CNN
CNN let him mix food with politics: for a 2016 episode, President Obama joined him for bún chả and a beer at a small restaurant in Hanoi.
Q 17Which chef opened Spago on the Sunset Strip in 1982?
Wolfgang Puck
Wolfgang Puck made Spago famous for pizzas with toppings such as smoked salmon, and its first pizza chef, Ed LaDou, went on to write the original menu for California Pizza Kitchen.
Q 18Paul Bocuse was the face of which cooking movement?
Nouvelle cuisine
Nouvelle cuisine swapped heavy sauces for lighter dishes and very fresh ingredients. Bocuse said the critic Henri Gault first used the name for food that Bocuse and other chefs prepared for Concorde's maiden flight.
Q 19Bocuse created his famous truffle soup in 1975 for which French president, whose initials it bears?
Valéry Giscard d'Estaing
Valéry Giscard d'Estaing had just awarded him the Legion of Honour at the Élysée Palace. The soup, truffles and foie gras in broth baked under a puff-pastry lid, stayed on Bocuse's menu as Soupe V.G.E.
Q 20Which chef's restaurants held more Michelin stars than any other chef's when he died in 2018?
Joël Robuchon
Joël Robuchon retired in 1995 at the age of 50, then changed course and staged a comeback, opening restaurants under his name from Las Vegas to Tokyo.
Foams were his signature: flavoured liquids aerated with a siphon rather than whipped up with cream or egg white. For all the lab methods, he doesn't call his cooking molecular gastronomy; his own word is 'deconstructed'.
Q 24René Redzepi and Claus Meyer opened which Copenhagen restaurant in a harbourside warehouse?
Noma
Noma is short for nordisk mad, Danish for 'Nordic food'. The kitchen held itself to ingredients from the region, which sent its cooks out foraging for wild plants.
Q 25Massimo Bottura's Osteria Francescana is in which Italian city, Enzo Ferrari's birthplace?
Modena
Modena is Bottura's home town too. For Milan's Expo in 2015 he set up the Refettorio Ambrosiano, a community kitchen turning surplus food into meals for people in need, and more have followed around the world.
Q 26The French Laundry, the famed restaurant in a former steam laundry, is in which Napa Valley town?
Yountville
Yountville: the stone building began as a saloon, became a French steam laundry in the 1920s after a local alcohol ban, and was turned into a restaurant in 1978 by the town's mayor and his wife, who kept the name.
Q 27In Pixar's Ratatouille, whose motto 'Anyone can cook' inspires Remy the rat to become a chef?
Auguste Gusteau
Auguste Gusteau is the late chef Remy idolises. For the film's climactic dish, Pixar had one of America's top chefs adapt confit byaldi, a ratatouille of thin vegetable rounds fanned out like an accordion.
Q 28José Andrés founded which non-profit that serves meals after natural disasters?
World Central Kitchen
World Central Kitchen began with his trip to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, where he cooked alongside displaced families in a camp and learned that comfort meant the local dishes people knew.
Q 29Which restaurant in Bray, England, was named the world's best in 2005?
Fat Duck
The Fat Duck was opened in 1995 by Heston Blumenthal, who is almost entirely self-taught: before it he had worked as a photocopier salesman and a debt collector.
Q 30Which unusual dish helped bring Heston Blumenthal to public attention?
Bacon-and-egg ice cream
Bacon-and-egg ice cream and snail porridge made headlines for his restaurant. He traces his obsession with food to a family holiday at 16, when a meal at a three-star restaurant in Provence left him smitten.