“I was lucky to have grown up in a poor family. If I had been rich, I might have become a lawyer … But I was poor, and God made me to be a chef. I smell like a chef, I feel like a chef, I look like a chef. I am a chef … I could have been a millionaire … What a disaster!”

Michel Richard, a French-Canadian, is formerly the owner of the Los Angeles restaurant Citrus and, more recently, of Citronelle in Georgetown, Washington DC.