Multi-starred chef Pierre Gagnaire, juror in the hidden brigade of Top Chef, married a well-known French writer.
Pierre Gagnaire, star of the French culinary landscape with 13 Michelin stars, is a chef admired as much by his peers as by fans of gastronomy. While the three-star chef now occupies the place of juror of the hidden brigade in the show Top Chef 2024, his appearances in the M6 culinary show regularly earn him the sympathy of Internet users. “Pierre Gagnaire elected the nicest chef in France” or “We should all have a Pierre Gagnaire in our lives”, can we see scrolling on the social network X, among the reactions of Internet users after the first episodes of Top Chef 2024.
For almost 20 years, Pierre Gagnaire has shared the life of a French writer whom he married in 2007. She was the one who fell in love with him in 2004, when he was married but unhappily married. … The meeting took place in London, while he was leaving the kitchen of his restaurant Sketch. “For me, it took a little longer,” the chef then confided to Gala.
The writer Sylvie Le Bihan was divorced and already had three children. She lived in London and visited his restaurant regularly, as a regular for his lobster and potatoes. “I fell in love with Pierre’s cooking before I knew the man,” she said in Closer. “I asked him why he had removed my lobster from the menu. He had changed the recipe, it was like a disappointment in love for me,” said the writer, before declaring: “He told me that he didn’t like habits. And we fell in love.”
Sylvie Le Bihan, who would become his wife, was his lifeline when he had to recover from bankruptcy after the failure of his three-star restaurant in Saint-Etienne. “She has experienced much more serious things than what I have been able to face. And she has such a joy of living despite all that,” the chef then continued, in his interview with the women’s celebrity magazine Gala. The 58-year-old writer, who released her first book Little gourmet library at Flammarion in 2013 with a preface written by her husband Pierre Gagnaire, has indeed caused a lot of talk following the release of her third novel in 2017, Let him take my secretwhere she delivers a poignant testimony about the gang rape she suffered at the age of 16 while she is a summer camp instructor.
Since this critically acclaimed novel, Sylvie Le Bihan collaborates on numerous projects on violence against women and men. In 2022, his novel The sacrificed in the heart of Spain in the 1930s was also noticed, and even nominated in the first selections for the Prix Renaudot. At the same time, since 2004, she has also been project director for Pierre Gagnaire restaurants abroad. In the columns of Le Monde in 2019, she confided that if “cooking was never obvious” for her, with a busy daily life where she was used to eating on the go, and this since her earliest childhood , it was only after meeting Pierre Gagnaire that she became interested in the world of gastronomy.