Raymond Blanc

Raymond Blanc is a French chef and restaurateur who has built his entire career in England and is widely credited, alongside the Roux brothers, with raising the standard of restaurant cooking in Britain in the 1980s. Born in Besançon in the Franche-Comté region of eastern France, he is famously self-taught — having been refused entry to the chef's apprenticeship system after failing his entrance exams.

He moved to England in 1972 and worked his way up through restaurant kitchens in Oxford before opening his own restaurant Les Quat'Saisons in Summertown, Oxford in 1977 with his then-wife Jenny. The restaurant earned its first Michelin star within a year, a second in 1982 — making him the first self-taught chef to be awarded two stars by Michelin — and he relocated the operation to a 15th-century manor house in the village of Great Milton, Oxfordshire in 1984, renaming it Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons. Le Manoir has now held two Michelin stars continuously for more than 40 years, the longest unbroken run at that level of any restaurant in the United Kingdom.

Beyond Le Manoir, Blanc co-founded the Brasserie Blanc chain of casual French restaurants, runs the influential Raymond Blanc Cookery School at Le Manoir (where Heston Blumenthal, Marco Pierre White and a generation of British chefs have spent time), and serves as president of the Sustainable Restaurant Association. His advocacy for kitchen gardens, organic produce and seasonal cooking pre-dates the British farm-to-table movement by two decades. He has been awarded an honorary OBE and is a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur.