Grimod de La Reynière

Though his father built a stylish house in Paris with a garden that looked onto the bosquets of the Champs-Élysées[2] and kept a great table,[3] the younger Grimod had been born with deformed hands[4] and was kept out of sight, a circumstance that developed his biting wit and dark sense of humour.

During his parents' absence he gave grand dinner parties in the Hôtel Grimod de La Reynière, at one of which his father returned suddenly to find a pig dressed up and presiding at the table.

The story made the rounds in Paris, and a breach with the family ensued, which culminated in a lettre de cachet that disinherited him and confined him to an abbey close to Nancy, where at the table of the father abbot he began to learn the art of good eating.

[8] As the first public critic of cooking, the first reviewer of the ambitious restaurants that cropped up in Paris in the later eighteenth century and flowered under the Napoleonic regime,[9] his name is a by-word on a par with Brillat-Savarin and an equally rich source of quotations in French gastronomic literature through the eight volumes of his annual L'Almanach des gourmands, which he edited and published from 1803 to 1812.

[citation needed] He inherited the family fortune at the death of his mother in 1812, married his devoted mistress, gave his own funeral to see who would come, then retired to the Château de Villiers-sur-Orge,[12] near Paris.