Meet the chef who almost died from eating
July 3, 2015 - 3:58 pm
A famous chef almost died from food poisoning? Yes, that life-changing irony happened to celebrity chef Hubert Keller of Las Vegas restaurants Fleur and Burger Bar.
Keller told me on my podcast he was on his death bed for six months, fighting a blood infection and a nervous system infection, after eating South Pacific tuna in Tahiti, a decade ago.
“I couldn’t walk anymore,” Keller said. “I was literally going (to die), and nobody could do anything.”
He stayed in that death bed, body shaking, health care workers testing his vitals routinely. He never felt like giving up.
“And one day, the infection stopped, and then it came down,” he said.
“That (near-death experience) changed my life too, a little bit, my way of thinking,” he said.
Now whenever he has “really rough days,” “I say, ‘There’s much more than that.’”
His favorite charity is the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Keller, who has no children, teared up when telling me about meeting dying children before one of the Make-A-Wish dinners he cooked.
“Now when I do a charity event for kids or other adults, I feel like I was fortunate to make it back” from the grave, he said. “I know people are very strong, and they are fighting it, too.
“Unfortunately, not everybody wins.”
If you remember “Batkid” Miles Scott — the Make-A-Wish recipient who captured the attention of the world on Nov. 15, 2013, by battling crime scenes — that event happened outside Keller’s Burger Bar in San Francisco, with some organizational help from his wife Chantal Keller. (Batkid, diagnosed with leukemia, is in remission.)
After moving from his native France to America in 1982, Keller took over a San Francisco restaurant and hired its first female server, to the ire of the all-male staff.
He was the first guest chef to be allowed to cook in the White House, for President Clinton.
The friendly chef, who also DJs, films the PBS series “Hubert Keller: Secrets of a Chef” in Las Vegas, Paris, Brazil and other exotic destinations.
And during one part of the “Doug Elfman Show” (iTunes, podcast apps, DougElfman.com), Keller and I discuss the insane moment when a restaurant group in Mandalay Bay changed the French name of Bleu Blanc Rouge restaurant to Red White & Blue, after France decided not to participate in our Iraq war invasion (which also inspired a Republican congressman to rename French fries “Freedom fries” in Congress cafes).
“They changed the painting on the walls. They changed the colors of the restaurant,” Keller said. “It was stupid.”
Keller remembers this shameful moment in Vegas history, because right next door to Bleu Blanc Rouge, Keller’s Fleur was under construction.
No one at Mandalay Bay pressured Keller to un-Frenchify, and no hotel guests complained about his delicious French cuisine.
“We were at Fleur de Lys with the French flag, but we never had an issue.”
The chef has lived in America longer than he lived in France. When he and his wife go to France, they refer to Vegas and San Francisco as home.
“I’m not turning my back to France. I’m very French. But we’re so lived-in here. We have our friends. And our friends are not just French people,” he said “We’ve always been accepted really well.”
Contact Doug Elfman at delfman@reviewjournal.com. He blogs at reviewjournal.com/elfman. Find him on Twitter: @VegasAnonymous.