The dean is making his way through the labyrinthine kitchens of New York's French Culinary Institute at a surprisingly good clip. At his every zig and zag — to pick up an armload of baguettes or to shout a quick "Allo!" to a colleague — another white-smocked cook turns from his or her station to emit a crisp, stand-at-attention "Chef!" The kitchens are a stainless-steel gauntlet of steam, fire, and constant clanging, and the floors — at least to an uninitiated visitor — feel about as trustworthy as the deck of a fishing boat in rough chop. It also happens to be a sweltering summer night, and the institute's AC is either on the fritz or maxed out. But the dean hardly breaks a sweat as he pivots down a hallway, descends the back stairs, and emerges into a packed auditorium that is also a demonstration kitchen. He snags a glass of Chablis off a table before materializing behind the fully stocked countertop, while a grandee from WLIW (Long Island's public television station) wraps up a rousing introduction: "I've worked with television cooks for 20 years — with Julia Child, all of them — and they will say that if you put them all in a room, Jacques Pépin has forgotten more than they all know!" At this, the roomful of top-dollar WLIW supporters — who have paid serious premiums to be here — explodes in a frenzy. Dean Pépin of the French Culinary Institute — the 72-year-old former chef to Charles de Gaulle, the on-air foil to Child, and the man who made cooking for a living seem cool to millions of Americans — gives a distinctly Gallic shrug. "Well, to quote Oscar Wilde," he says, " 'I'm not young enough to know everything.'" The crowd explodes again. The dean, meanwhile, has already carved a stick of butter into a series of ornate rosettes.

Next year marks the fiftieth anniversary of Pépin's arrival in America, a country whose eating habits he's done much to upgrade. The arc of that half century is astonishing: 20-some cookbooks (including the enduring La Technique); sundry TV shows (notably Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home); columns in The New York Times, House Beautiful, and Food & Wine; countless appearances at cooking academies and food fests; and a cornucopia of laurels, from an Emmy to the French Legion of Honor. With a new public television series and tie-in cookbook (More Fast Food My Way) due out this month, Pépin shows no signs of slowing down.

When the 23-year-old Pépin — who was born in Bourg-en-Bresse and grew up around Lyon before heading to Paris — stepped off the boat in 1959, he'd already logged ten years as a kitchen pro. There had been stints at Le Meurice (serving under Chef émile Ripert, who in turn had served under Escoffier), at the Plaza Athénée, and, of course, for the giant man whom Pépin, like all good Frenchmen, called "Mon Général." (De Gaulle had a weakness, Pépin reports, for lamb.) In New York, the diminutive young chef became the dashing lieutenant under the legendary Pierre Franey at New York's Le Pavillon. It was the most famous French restaurant in the United States, and it put him in an enviable position. "What they call the trinity of Craig Claiborne and Julia Child and James Beard," Pépin recalls of a mythic era that was America's gourmet awakening, "I knew those people only six months after I was here. That's how small the food world was back then."