Bernanrd Loiseau was a great chef and a functioning bipolar. After years of workaholism through which he succeeded in making his restaurant, the Cote d'Or, the talk of the food world, he killed himself, leaving behind three young children - and a three star restaurant.

The Perfectionist tells, through the life of Loiseau, the history of French cooking in the transition from Escoffier cuisine to the development of nouvelle cuisine. In doing so it details the bitterness, the competition, and the infighting between great chefs, most of whom worked together as apprehentnices in their youth. The Perfectionist also chronicles everything it takes - as a person, a chef, and a buisnessman - to create and maintain a three star Michelin place. While not the most organized book in the world, and surprisingly full of editorial errors (spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, including over usage of strange words), the fascinating details of the story in itself make this book a worthy read. ( )

This is the story of Bernard Loiseau, a French chef who became one of the stars of French haute cuisine in the 1990s, received three Michelin stars, and later committed suicide. Loiseau's story is predictable in many ways (the subtitle alone tells the reader what's going to happen), but Chelminski manages to keep things interesting. Chelminski weaves in the stories of other top-level French chefs who either influenced Loiseau or were his contemporaries, and he provides excellent insights into the world of very expensive restaurants, from details like kitchen organization to the relationships among the top chefs. In the beginning of the book, Chelminski occasionally wanders too far from the main topic, but he focuses better as the story progresses. In general, he writes with a style that is both engaging and challenging, but the writing is sometimes repetitive of both facts and phrases--for example, he uses "Manichean" three times in an book of approximately 350 pages. He might take a cue from the cuisine he describes with such care: know how much is enough. ( )