Bertrand Grébaut

Bertrand Grébaut was a French chef and restaurateur who, with his friend and business partner Théophile Pourriat, opened Septime in 2011 and helped change the way Paris ate out. Working on rue de Charonne in the 11th arrondissement, far from the grand dining rooms of the Left Bank and the 8th, he served precise, vivid, largely vegetable-led cooking in a relaxed room of concrete floors and rough wooden tables. Septime became one of the most sought-after reservations in the world, won a Michelin star in 2014 and became a symbol of bistronomie, the movement that brought fine-dining technique into informal, affordable settings.

Grébaut was born in Paris on 5 December 1981, the son of Christian Grébaut, a corporate executive, and Catherine Arteau-Grébaut, an art historian. Food was part of family life. He later recalled that his mother cooked a different dinner every night and that part of his family made wine in the Bordeaux region. As a teenager he was passionate about graffiti, which he painted around Paris, and he studied at the Penninghen art school with the aim of becoming a freelance graphic designer. He found that world boring.

He and Pourriat, a friend from his teenage years, shared an apartment and spent their free time exploring Paris restaurants. "We thought about nothing but food," they later wrote. Pourriat took work as a server, while Grébaut enrolled at the Ferrandi culinary school in Paris, where he graduated at the top of his class. His first internship, at the Hôtel Scribe, was in an old-school brigade where he was spoken to rudely and given the most menial tasks, and he said he came very close to quitting.

The turning point came in the kitchen of Alain Passard at L'Arpège, the three-star restaurant devoted to vegetable cooking, where Grébaut worked as chef de partie from 2006. He said it was where he learned the most and where he realised he felt closer to a fruit and vegetable cuisine than to the technical cooking of luxury hotels. In 2008 he became chef at L'Agapé in Paris, which earned a Michelin star in 2009 while he was still in his twenties, and Gault&Millau named him its Young Talent of the Year. He and his partner, the chef Tatiana Levha, whom he had met at Ferrandi, then spent several months travelling in Asia.

Septime opened in 2011. It was named after Monsieur Septime, the tyrannical restaurateur played by Louis de Funès in the 1966 comedy Le Grand Restaurant, and was conceived as the kind of restaurant the two friends wanted to eat in themselves. Grébaut said moving to the east of Paris was "a no-brainer," describing a neighbourhood with energy, creative freedom and an open-minded population. Success was immediate. The short menu, close links with producers and a strong focus on organic and traceable ingredients set the tone for a generation of Paris kitchens. GQ France named him its chef of the year in 2013, and Septime climbed The World's 50 Best Restaurants list, reaching No. 11 in 2024 and No. 40 in 2025.

Around Septime, Grébaut and Pourriat built a small family of addresses: La Cave, a natural wine bar, and Clamato, a walk-in seafood bar, both opened in 2013; D'une Île, a country inn at Rémalard-en-Perche in the Perche Regional Nature Park, opened in 2018; and Tapisserie, a pastry shop, opened in 2021, with a second shop on the Left Bank in 2022. Colleagues and critics stressed that he cared as much about the team and the working atmosphere as about the plate. The Michelin Guide said he had been one of the first to want real traceability of products, in a better working atmosphere and a team spirit he cherished above all.

Grébaut and Levha married and had two children, Anna and Roman. Levha and her sister Katia run the Paris restaurants Le Servan and Double Dragon.

In the autumn of 2025 Grébaut learned that he had cancer, reported as a rare form of the disease, and he scaled back his activities while still appearing in the kitchen from time to time. He died in Paris on 2 July 2026, aged 44. Pourriat announced the death on Septime's Instagram account, writing that Grébaut had fought the illness with all his strength and immense courage and that he had lost "my best friend, my partner, my brother." The restaurants stayed open until the funeral and then closed for three days. Alain Passard called him a visionary, and the Fooding guide described his cooking as intuitive, free, committed and uninhibited.