Wylie Dufresne

Wylie Dufresne is an American chef widely credited with bringing the techniques of European molecular gastronomy — hydrocolloids, transglutaminase, foams, gels, sous-vide — to American restaurant cooking. He was born in Providence, Rhode Island, to a restaurant-industry family (his father Dewey Dufresne was a longtime restaurateur in New York) and graduated from Colby College in 1992 with a degree in philosophy before enrolling at the French Culinary Institute in New York.

After graduating from the FCI in 1993 he went to work for Jean-Georges Vongerichten, first at Jo Jo and then at Jean-Georges, eventually becoming chef de cuisine at Vongerichten's Prime restaurant at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. In 1999 he returned to New York to open 71 Clinton Fresh Food, a small Lower East Side restaurant whose ambitious cooking on a tiny budget earned him a New York Times two-star review and Food & Wine Best New Chef honors in 2001.

In 2003, with his father Dewey, he opened wd~50 on Clinton Street — the restaurant that defined his career. wd~50 served avant-garde tasting menus built around techniques unfamiliar to most American chefs at the time: powdered foie gras, scrambled-egg ravioli with melted-cheese skin, deep-fried mayonnaise, cold-smoked corn-flake noodles. It won a Michelin star in 2007 and held it for most of its run. wd~50 closed in 2014 when the building was demolished, and is now broadly recognized as the most influential American molecular-gastronomy restaurant of its era — a training ground for chefs including Christina Tosi, Sam Mason, Alex Stupak and many others.

After wd~50 he opened Alder in the East Village (2013–2016), a more casual restaurant exploring the same ideas in pub-food format, and in 2017 launched Du's Donuts at the William Vale hotel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn — a project that brought hydrocolloid-driven texture work to American cake donuts. He has won the James Beard Award for Best Chef New York City (2013) and has been an active culinary consultant and educator since.