By Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Sun-Times
December 12, 1999
These days – after 31 years of marriage – Jean and Doris Banchet communicate to each other in English. But when they met in England in the early 1960s, there was a considerable language barrier.
He spoke French. And she spoke German.
“Eventually, I started carrying around a little dictionary so that I could communicate with him,” says Doris, 66. “But we somehow always just understood what was going on. At the time, I was managing a little restaurant and Jean was the chef in a casino across the street. He used to come in for breakfast.”
And she knew he liked her, right?
“Oh yes,” she says, laughing. “He flirted with me all the time. What do you expect of a Frenchman?”
On their first date, he invited her to dinner at the restaurant at which he worked. Doris brought along a girlfriend.
“He made us a beautiful dinner,” she says. “It was a cold salmon. I wasn’t a big fish eater at all. I looked at it and thought to myself, `Oh my god! I can’t eat this. What am I going to do?’ But it would’ve been impolite to not eat it after the trouble he had gone to in its preparation, so I ate it to be polite. But once I started eating it, man, was it good! I ate the whole plate.”
No doubt. The chef was already building a name for himself as a visionary in cooking. (His reputation would be sealed soon after he and Doris opened Le Francais in northwest suburban Wheeling in 1973.) The couple lived together for five years before getting married in 1968.
“We never really got engaged,” Doris says. “It was just understood.”
That same year, they moved to Lake Geneva, Wis., where Jean was offered a job at the Playboy Club.
“It was a good job,” Jean, 59, remembers. “But whenever you work for someone else, you have limitations. So when we had the opportunity, we opened (Le Francais) five years later.”
With Jean doing all the cooking and Doris handling the business affairs, the couple spend most of their time at work. And one of the drawbacks of running a world-renowned dining establishment means that the couple don’t have much time to enjoy vacations.
“I think that our last vacation together was in 1970,” Doris says. “It is just impossible to get Jean out of the kitchen.”
When they do have a spare moment or two, they enjoy dining at places such as Charlie Trotter’s. And no wonder.
“When I go there, the chefs all line up,” he says. Without missing a beat, he adds, “And they applaud.”
