Plan B Forum

Chef Benoit Violier, whose Swiss restaurant was named the best in the world in December, has been found dead at his home.



Mr Violier, 44, ran the Restaurant de l'Hotel de Ville in Crissier, near the city of Lausanne.

It earned three Michelin stars and came top in France's La Liste ranking of the world's 1,000 best eateries.

Swiss police said Mr Violier, who was born in France, is believed to have killed himself.

The Swiss news website 24 Heures said (in French) that Mr Violier had been due to attend the launch of the new Michelin guide in Paris on Monday.

His death comes some six months after that of Philippe Rochat, his mentor and predecessor at the Restaurant de l'Hotel de Ville.

Having worked at the restaurant since 1996, Mr Violier took it over along with his wife Brigitte in 2012, before obtaining Swiss nationality.

A keen hunter, he was known for signature dishes including game and produced a weighty book on game meat last year.

In the middle of kitchen sits a meat grinder with a lot of perfectly normal ground meat coming out of it...there's a man's arm sticking out of the feed chute of the grinder, with the hand gripping the handle... there's the suave detective... (saying thoughtfully)

"Most determined case of suicide I've ever seen."

In 2003, Bernard Loiseau, the chef and owner of the Côte d’Or, a Michelin three-star restaurant in Burgundy, was found dead in his home at 52. Last April, the chef Homaro Cantu, whose Chicago restaurant, Moto, had received a Michelin star, hanged himself. He was 38.

"...Bitterness Follows French Chef's Death
By CRAIG S. SMITH
Published: February 26, 2003

SAULIEU, France, Feb. 25— What killed Bernard Loiseau?

Mr. Loiseau, one of the country's most celebrated chefs, was found dead beside a hunting rifle in his village home here on Monday.

Within hours, France's haute society was abuzz with speculation over the reasons for his death, apparently a suicide. Mr. Loiseau's death followed the downgrading of his highly rated restaurant here by the influential and respected Gault-Millau restaurant guide and suggestions that it was in danger of losing one of the three stars awarded it by the all-powerful red Michelin Guide. Such downgrades in the past have driven chefs to desperate acts.

But Mr. Loiseau, 52, was also facing falling profits and exhaustion, his associates say.

''We don't know why he did it,'' said a red-eyed Stéphanie Gaitey, his assistant, sitting in a corner of the lush, rustic restaurant Mr. Loiseau bought in 1982 on what was once the stagecoach route between Paris and the south of France.

But Paul Bocuse, France's most famous chef, was quick to point the finger at the country's restaurant guides, whose ratings can make or break a culinary establishment -- particularly one in an out-of-the-way corner of the country like Mr. Loiseau's Hôtel de la Côte d'Or.

''Bravo, Gault-Millau, you have won,'' Mr. Bocuse was quoted as saying in the daily newspaper Le Parisien. He said Mr. Loiseau had been distraught over Gault-Millau's downgrade when the two men spoke by telephone on Sunday. Mr. Bocuse likened the country's culinary critics to court eunuchs, who ''understand how it's done, but can't do it. ... "