In The Name of The Father: Jérôme Bocuse to Sue Institute

Jérôme Bocuse, son of France’s iconic chef Paul Bocuse, is suing an elite cooking school founded by his late father, for allowing his father’s name to be used in undignified commercial ventures, such as airline food, which would not grace his father's table.

The Paul Bocuse Institute is being sued by Jérôme Bocuse in a case which should appear in French courts in 2023. The stakes are high in this battle, as it has been alleged that Bocuse is demanding a fee for the use of the family name that his too high, and which may prove to be an existential threat to the institute, according to Le Figaro.

The institute, which has borne the name of its founder for twenty years, claims that it has an agreement in place with Paul Bocuse to use the family name until 2037. However, Jérôme claims that the institute goes far beyond the usage rights imagined by his father, and squanders the family name on commercial ventures his father would never have approved of. Bocuse has been fighting the issue for three years.

He told Le Figaro: “The values ​​my father advocated are betrayed. No one will steal his name from us. All his life, he repeated to me how proud he was. With the other entities in Lyon that bear my father's name, such as Les Halles Paul Bocuse and the Bocuses d’Or, everything is fine”.

Paul Bocuse, the legendary chef

The Bocuse family, which can trace its lineage in gastronomy back to 1729, is notoriously protective of the family name. In 1921, Paul Bocuse’s grandfather ceded his name to a Russian named Borisoff, in exchange for the hand of his rather beautiful wife. With the moniker ‘Bocusoff’ - a humiliation of sorts for the family - after winning his third Michelin star, Paul paid to have the family name restored to its original ‘Bocuse’, and it has been emblazoned in giant neon lettering outside the chef’s eponymous restaurant in Lyon ever since.