Barrington-Based Nonprofit Supports the Transformative Power of Culinary Education

December 18 is chef Jacques Pépin’s 90th birthday. He and his family have been toasting the milestone occasion throughout this entire year, at locations near and far, from Guisto, Oberlin, CHOP and River Bar in Rhode Island to the French Laundry in Napa Valley, California.

As part of a fundraising effort for the Jacques Pépin Foundation, chefs from across the country have been hosting dinners to honor Pépin and his legendary career, which includes serving as personal chef to three French heads of state, publishing more than 30 cookbooks and hosting numerous television cooking programs.

The goal? 90 dinners to celebrate 90 years.

Proceeds from the dinners benefit the nonprofit foundation, which supports community-based kitchens that offer culinary training to adults with high barriers to employment, including those who have been impacted by the justice system, who are in recovery or who are unhoused.

“It’s very gratifying to help people—to teach them skills so that they can get jobs,” says Pépin, who lives in Madison, Connecticut, and serves as the organization’s executive chairman. “Working in kitchens can rebuild a life.”

The Jacques Pépin Foundation is based in Barrington and is directed by Pépin’s daughter, Claudine Pépin, and son-in-law, Rollie Wesen, who live there. Through its grant-making program, by the end of 2025, the foundation will have disbursed about $2 million to more than 100 culinary training programs throughout the country since its founding in 2016, according to Wesen. Most individual grants range from about $5,000 to $25,000, and the organizations that receive them can use the funds as they see fit, Claudine Pépin adds.

“The community knows what the community needs, and we want to support that idea more than we want to say we know best,” she says. “Sometimes the biggest barrier to somebody doing a free program is childcare and transportation, so we’ve provided that, and notably, one organization asked for a commercial washer and dryer because most of their students are homeless.”

In May, River Bar in Westerly hosted a sold-out dinner that allowed the restaurant to make a $10,000 donation to the foundation, according to co-owner Executive Chef James Wayman, who designed a menu that honored the lauded chef with technique-driven yet unfussy dishes, like raw scallops cured under pork fat and Vietnamese-style caramel braised chicken. Jacques Pépin, who has attended several but not all the dinners, was present that night, which was meaningful for diners as well as for the restaurant’s staff, Wayman says.

“He’s got a great presence,” Wayman says. “He’s so warm and humble … and he’s one of, if not the most respected, talented and wonderful culinary icons in the whole food world. Having him there absolutely elevates everybody’s experience and brings amazing energy. I just love being around him.”

In April, Oberlin in Providence hosted a collaborative dinner to benefit the foundation with chefs from Rhode Island’s Dolores, New Rivers, Nimki, Gift Horse and Dune Brothers Seafood, as well as Moonrose Farm, in Rehoboth, Massachusetts, and Sarma, in Somerville, Massachusetts. A dinner at the end of May at Giusto in Newport brought together five additional chefs.

Claudine Pépin and Wesen came up with the idea for the foundation as a way to honor her father’s influence and culinary career, which has focused on teaching cooking skills through his cookbooks, television programs and, more recently, online videos. During the planning stages, they presented Pépin with ideas for different options for programs and causes that the foundation could support.

“Rollie suggested a whole litany of things, and when we got to the idea about helping disenfranchised people, my dad was, like, ‘That’s the one,’” Claudine Pépin says.

Wesen, who teaches academic courses about the food system, as well as culinary lab courses, as a professor at Johnson & Wales in Providence, said the idea to support culinary training programs was inspired in part by his time volunteering at the Rhode Island Community Food Bank’s former Community Kitchen culinary training program, which he saw transform participants’ lives.

In addition to providing grant awards, recipes and technique videos, the foundation has also helped some of the organizations it supports to connect with one another and form a network, through which they can share experiences and advice.

“He’s one of, if not the most respected, talented and wonderful culinary icons in the whole food world.”

“We realized that community-building within the community kitchen network was something that we could really help facilitate because of the power of Jacques’ name and because of our culinary expertise,” Wesen says.

Beyond its direct financial impact, being associated with the foundation offers a “stamp of approval,” according to Joshua Riazi, the founding executive chef of the Culinary Hub of Providence, also known as CHOP, a restaurant and culinary workforce training center in Providence run by the nonprofit Genesis Center, which has received several grant awards from the foundation.

“Their support helps legitimize, to the larger community of professional restaurateurs, what our small, community-based organization is doing, which is really important,” says Riazi, who organized a fundraiser dinner for the foundation at CHOP in March.

Individuals can also support the foundation by purchasing a membership, which grants access to hundreds of cooking videos, or by making a donation after hosting a dinner at home as part of the foundation’s birthday campaign. (A hosting guide with menu inspiration, recipes and invitation templates is available at CelebrateJacques.org.)

“When you bring people together in your kitchen and you cook together and sit down to eat together, you’re literally living our mission,” Claudine Pépin says. “So, while our ‘90 for 90’ campaign might be over after Jacques turns 90, the mission of wanting to teach and inspire people to cook is certainly going to live on.”

The “90 for 90” series is expected to wrap up on December 18 with a sold-out “Official 90th Birthday Bash” at Madison Beach Hotel in Jacques Pépin’s hometown. By then, since most of the dinners are collaborative, about 250 chefs will have participated.

“Two hundred fifty chefs donated their time, donated their product, their resources, donated their staffs’ time to come out and celebrate Jacques and draw attention to the work of the foundation,” Claudine Pépin says. “That’s just extraordinary.”

Jenna Pelletier is a Rhode Island–based features journalist who has worked on staff as a writer and editor at Boston magazine, The Providence Journal and Rhode Island Monthly. Her food writing has also been published in Food & Wine and The Boston Globe.

For more information, including how to host your own 90/90 dinner, visit jp.foundation.