At his best, his food was utterly sublime. I miss the days of Jean-Louis at the Watergate.

Jean-Louis Palladin, a fearless and passionate cook who helped to free French cuisine in the United States from a hidebound orthodoxy while influencing a generation of chefs and food lovers, died yesterday in McLean, Va. He was 55.

The cause of death was lung cancer, said Ann Brody, a spokeswoman for his family.

While Mr. Palladin never achieved the public profile of contemporaries like Alice Waters and Paul Prudhomme, he was a chef's chef whose boundless creativity and relentless pursuit of the best and freshest ingredients set an example for countless other cooks. His first restaurant in the United States, Jean-Louis at the Watergate, opened in 1979 in Washington. It drew not only the capital's political elite, but also chefs and restaurateurs from all over the world who made the pilgrimage to taste his cooking and learn his techniques.

In a departure from the image of the haughty and secretive chef, Mr. Palladin always made time to share his knowledge and methods with almost anyone who asked. He had a rare eye for talent, and employed or counseled young chefs who went on to brilliant careers of their own, including Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin; Daniel Boulud; Christian Delouvrier of Lespinasse; and Sylvain Portay, formerly of Le Cirque and now at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco.

"He was probably the most important influence in my life in terms of food," said Drew Nieporent, whose restaurants include Montrachet, Nobu and Tribeca Grill in New York and Rubicon in San Francisco. "He was part teacher, part confidant, a world traveler and the greatest French chef in America."

Nowadays, some diners at fine restaurants take for granted ingredients like fresh foie gras, scallops plucked by scuba divers from the ocean floor and wild mushrooms. But in 1979, when Mr. Palladin arrived in Washington, those things were largely unknown in the United States. The glum refrain among most French chefs in America was that everything was better back in France.

But Mr. Palladin made it his business to seek out the ingredients he wanted, whether it was monkfish livers, squid ink sacs or anything else that was routinely discarded.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/26/ob...es/26PALL.html