Who

Torres is a pastry chef, chocolatier and TV host who operates three eponymous chocolate shops around town. For food writers prone to clichés, he's known as "New York's Willy Wonka."

Backstory

Torres started his career as 15-year-old apprentice in a small Provence pastry shop, before heading off to culinary school. In 1980, a bet with a friend prompted him to approach the temperamental French chef Jacques Maximin and ask for a job in the kitchen at Nice's posh Hotel Negresco. To Torres' surprise, Maximin told him to come back an hour later ready to work, and he ended up staying eight years at the two-star restaurant, teaching pastry at a cooking school in Cannes on the side. In 1988, Torres decamped to the U.S. to work as a corporate pastry chef at the Ritz-Carlton in Palm Springs. A year later, after Sirio Maccioni constructed an elaborate $100,000 pastry kitchen at Le Cirque, Torres was named executive pastry chef, and stayed for close to a decade before heading out on his own.

Of note

In 2000, thanks to developer David Walentas's offer of temporary free rent, Torres opened a chocolate shop in Brooklyn's DUMBO neighborhood. It quickly generated buzz (it also generated buzz for DUMBO, which was what Walentas was looking for), and in 2002 Torres was handed his own Food Network show, Chocolate with Jacque Torres. Two years later he opened, on Hudson Street in Manhattan, an 8,000-square-foot chocolate-making fun factory with chocolate faucets and a statue of an Aztec cacao god. Torres' third chocolate shop, on Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side, opened in 2007.

On the side

He's involved with the French Culinary Institute, where he's currently the dean of pastry arts.

Personal

His romantic partner is Kris Kruid. (She's also his business partner.) The couple lives in the West 50s.