After World War II, his parents opened a restaurant called Le Pélican, where Pépin worked as a child, and later became known for his love for food.

There he enrolled in English for foreign students, a GED equivalent, and eventually General Studies classes toward a Bachelor of Arts degree at Columbia University.

[8][9] He entered into a doctoral program at Columbia, but his proposed thesis on French food in literature was rejected for being too frivolous for serious academic pursuit.

From 1956 to 1958, during his military service, he was recognized for his culinary training and skill and was ordered to work in the Office of the Treasury, where he met his long-time cooking partner, Jean-Claude Szurdak, and eventually became the personal chef to three French heads of state, including Charles de Gaulle.

In 1961, after Pépin had declined an offer from John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy to serve as chef at the White House, Howard Johnson, a regular Le Pavillon customer, hired him to work alongside fellow Frenchman Pierre Franey to develop food lines for his chain of Howard Johnson's restaurants, where Pépin served as the director of research and development for a decade.

In 1970, Pépin opened a specialty soup restaurant and lunch counter on Manhattan's 5th Avenue called La Potagerie, and began to enjoy popular success with appearances on talk shows such as What's My Line?

[1] Beginning in the mid-1970s, after a car accident which damaged his left arm, Pépin reinvented himself as an educator, author and eventually a television personality.

Pépin worked as a consultant for restaurateur Joe Baum on his Windows on the World project, and offered classes at small cooking schools and cookware shops around the United States.

The use of thousands of photographs, illustrating the techniques and methods required to achieve certain culinary results, provided a window into the art of cooking.

Also in 1982, he filmed his first television series, with PBS local station WJCT-TV in Jacksonville, Florida, and published a companion cookbook entitled Everyday Cooking with Jacques Pépin.

In 1989, Pépin partnered with Julia Child and Rebecca Alssid to create a culinary certificate program within the Metropolitan College at Boston University (BU).

[15] Pépin continues to teach at the ICC and at BU, and offers book signings, culinary demonstrations and classes on Oceania cruises and at various locations across the US, several times per year.

The mission of the foundation is to support organizations that provide culinary training to adults and youths with barriers to employment such as low-income, low-skills, homelessness, issues with substance abuse and previous incarceration.

The JPF provides grants, independent research, source and curricular materials, equipment, direct teaching and video instruction to community-based culinary training programs around the USA.

Relaunched on PBS ten years after its initial run, the series included a new introduction by Pépin where he stressed that the secret to being a successful chef and not a mere line cook lies in knowing and using the proper technique.

According to its producer, Tina Salter KQED-TV, the series would be his "most personal and special, revealing a man – a legend – whose lust for life, love of food, family and friends continues".

A documentary about his life, Jacques Pépin: The Art of Craft,[24] aired as part of the PBS series American Masters, premiering May 26, 2017.

[29] On February 5, 2010, during the christening of MS Marina, Pépin was named an honorary commodore of the Oceania Cruises fleet,[30] for which he serves as executive culinary director.

Cooking for Pépin at the event, hosted by Martha Stewart, were French chefs Alain Ducasse, Daniel Boulud, and others.

His car hit the deer, veered off the road, struck a telephone pole, then crashed into a ravine and landed upside-down and on fire.

[37][38] In his autobiography, The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen,[1] Pépin notes that his accident caused him to realize that he would not be able to continue working full-time as a chef/restaurateur; this realization motivated his reinvention as a teacher and author.