Reviewed by Jessica MacMurray Blaine

Reading The Perfectionist is a study in heartbreak. Each page, each anecdote brings you both closer to the deeply talented, deeply flawed Bernard Loiseau and to the end that you know, from page 1, is coming. It's not a story about what happened, but why - and it's painful and wonderful and fascinating.

Loiseau was one of France's greatest chefs - one of only twenty five Frenchmen to win three Michelin stars, a recipient of the Legion d'Honneur, and an exuberant presence in French cuisine - until February 2003, when he finished the lunch service, folded his apron just as he always did, went home and shot himself.

But the heartbreak in Rudolph Chelminski's loving, rich biography, comes much before that. As Chelminski chronicles both Loiseau's life and the cultural climate of haute cuisine, he brings humanity and depth to a world that, with all of its flourish and pomp, can be so rarefied as to be inaccessible. But for Loiseau, it was everything. His is not a story about food or restaurants but rather about the collision of talent and insecurity, wild success and seemingly endless pressure.

Few métiers are as structured, as competitive, as fraught with tightly coiled passion as that of a French chef. Most chefs are trained in the traditional brigade system, an unassailable hierarchy that takes boys barely out of nursery school into kitchens, works them almost beyond reason, and eventually teaches them the long line of specific tasks that lead, for some, to chef - which in French doesn't mean "cook," but "leader." In this system, the chef is the king, and to aspire to be one takes a particular ego, a vast ambition and a thick skin.

Loiseau became a chef, and he knew that for him and his colleagues, there was only one real judge: Michelin, the annual guide that regularly makes and breaks chef's careers. When news of his third star reached him at La Cote d'Or, his magnificent hotel and restaurant, he embraced his wife with tears in his eyes. "This is the best day of my life," he said.

But the pressure to perform, to maintain the stars in the face of changing fashion and a fickle media was too much for Loiseau. When fashion changed, a critic turned against him, and rumors began that his third star was in danger of disappearing, Loiseau descended into a depression from which he would never recover.