From 1995: Top chef hurt in kitchen accident
Le Bec-Fin’s Georges Perrier sliced four fingers in a food processor. He’s expected to recover fully.
This story was originally published on September 19, 1995.
It could happen to anyone in the kitchen.
It happened yesterday to Philadelphia’s Georges Perrier, one of the premier chefs on the planet. He sliced the tips of four fingers on the razor-sharp blades of a heavy-duty food processor.
Three fingers were cut nearly to the bone.
The accident occurred before lunchtime in the kitchen of Le Bec-Fin, Perrier’s Walnut Street restaurant. The injury was to his right hand. He is right-handed.
The chef underwent surgery at Pennsylvania Hospital and was resting comfortably last night, said his spokeswoman, Clare Pelino. None of the fingers was severed, she said.
Perrier was expected to be released this morning.
His plastic surgeon, Scott Brenman, predicted that Perrier would regain full use of the hand, according to Pelino.
Perrier, who has been cooking professionally for 36 of his 51 years, was chopping food in a robot coupe, a circular heavy-duty food processor that spins food past a series of blades. The machine is used in restaurant kitchens but is not marketed to consumers.
“I guess he just stuck his hand in there to get a taste,” said Neil Stein, Perrier’s friend and an owner of Striped Bass, a restaurant across the street. Police escorted Perrier - in his chef’s whites - to a squad car.
“It was quite a scene,” said an assistant, who was doing prep work for lunch at Le Bec-Fin. He asked not to be identified. “We knew Chef had to get out of there right away.”
Lunch and dinner yesterday at the restaurant went on as usual, Pelino said.
Others in the restaurant community shuddered at the news. “It was a freak accident. (The robot coupe) has guards, but sometimes we chefs take chances,” said Jack McDavid, a chef who owns Jack’s Firehouse, Down Home Diner and Down Home Grill in Philadelphia.
“Many chefs have had close calls like this,” McDavid said. “When you’ve been in the business as long as some of us have, you take chances. Georges got caught. We’re (the restaurant community) all very concerned. It hit us close to home. Everybody in the business is in sympathy with Georges.”
Perrier, who has won awards on the local, national and international levels, last month achieved a certain celebrity. He cooked a lobster dish and opened a bottle of champagne with a saber - a copy of one carried by Napoleon - on The Late Show with David Letterman.
The Lyon-born son of a jeweler father and a doctor mother, Perrier studied cooking as a teenager.
He was ready to open his first restaurant in France when he was asked to come to Philadelphia, to La Panetiere at 13th and Spruce Streets. In 1971, when the owners moved, Perrier renamed the tiny 30-seat restaurant Le Bec-Fin. The name means “the edge of a bird’s beak,” a French idiom for “the good taste.”
In his first year, he recalled, he would work alone in the kitchen from
dawn to midnight, doing all the cooking, the pastry-making, and even the flower-arranging.
Success came after a year of sparse business and fears of exhaustion and bankruptcy, he once told an interviewer.
In 1983, he moved Le Bec-Fin to its present location on the 1500 block of Walnut Street, where today it anchors a block of Philadelphia’s priciest restaurants, including Striped Bass, Susanna Foo and Circa.
Perrier’s dining room is booked for months with patrons who gladly part with $97 - plus tax, gratuity and beverage - for a six-course prix-fixe dinner. Lunch is about half that.
This story was originally published on September 19, 1995.