Great Chef Claude Aubert

Claude Aubert
Le Bec-Fin
Covington LA

Claude Aubert has always been a chef’s chef. His compatriot chefs have held him in respect, admiring his courtly manners, impeccable training, and great talent. Le Bec Fin, his small, very French restaurant across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, has a lovely, classic quality.

“I am a French chef,” he said with great pride when taped for Great Chefs.

Born in the south of France near the port of Toulon, Aubert was raised on a farm, which he always felt contributed to his expertise in selecting the finest products for the restaurants in which he worked as executive chef. As was traditional for all European-trained chefs of his generation, Aubert went through a rigorous apprenticeship beginning when he was only 13. “After two years of hard, physical work in my hometown of Vinon, I was sent to the Brittany coast to the kitchen of a great hotel and it literally took six years of intense work until I was made Chef de Cuisine at the Hotel de la Jette in Toulon.”

Until 1963, when Aubert began travels which took him to Africa — Niger, Senegal, Cameroon, and Chad — and then to New Orleans, in 1971. In this most French of American cities he and his family put down roots. After working as executive chef at both the Louis XVI and Arnaud’s restaurants in the city’s French Quarter, Aubert bought the small restaurant he named “Le Bec Fin” — “finicky eater.” Restored to a soft country style with a massive stone fireplace, Le Bec Fin has become a landmark for classic French cooking.