Émile Bernard (chef)

His long and successful career at the service of kings and princes made him the greatest connoisseur of European crowned heads’ favoured tastes and cuisines.

Bernard was later appointed personal chef to King William I of Prussia, later Kaiser, for whom he had cooked during a state visit to Lyon.

Nonetheless, as he remained “Français de coeur”,[1] when the war broke out between Prussia and France in 1870, Bernard left his position to return to his native land of Jura, where he eventually lived in the Château des Buvettes.

In contrast to service à la française, where the meals were prepared and laid on the table before hand, service à la russe introduced a new manner of dining which involved courses being prepared, carved and plated in the kitchen and sent out sequentially whilst still hot.

Bernard also wrote together with friend and fellow chef, Urbain Dubois, whom he had met in Russia, the nineteenth century classic La Cuisine classique, études pratiques, raisonnées et démonstratives de l'école française appliquée au service à la Russe (1856),[2] which was republished a dozen times up until the beginning of the twentieth century.