Philippe Chin, renowned chef and bon vivant in Philadelphia in the ’90s, has died at 62

Philippe Chin, the Harley-riding, cowboy-booted chef who owned the popular Center City restaurants Chanterelles and Philippe at the Locust Club in the 1990s, died Friday, days after his 62nd birthday. He suffered a cardiac arrest Monday in Baltimore on the way to the airport for a trip to Las Vegas with his wife.

Since 2016, Mr. Chin was the senior executive chef with Bon Appetit Management Co., heading the kitchens at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore — his longest stop in a peripatetic career that took him from culinary school in his native Paris to beach resorts in the Caribbean, the Jersey Shore, and Hawaii, and to corporate catering in Washington.

Marc Vetri, one of Philadelphia’s top chefs, gives Mr. Chin credit for his start as a restaurateur in 1998. An Abington native who had cooked in Italy and New York, Vetri came home to look for his first restaurant when he heard that Mr. Chin was selling Chanterelles, at 1312 Spruce St. “Philippe was the chef who really gave me a chance,” said Vetri, who opened Vetri Cucina at the address. “He had to believe in me because I was taking over his lease, and if I defaulted, it was on him. I will always be thankful.”

Mr. Chin’s wife, Sallie D’Alonzo, also a chef, said that “every day with him was an adventure, and he was always up for doing something different and unique.” They met during the summer of 2012 while he ran a restaurant in Somers Point, N.J., and married 2½ years ago. She called him “a very soft guy, a very loving person underneath that exterior and bravado. The charisma never went away. Definitely the life of the party.”

Mr. Chin deftly wove together the two culinary stylings of his boyhood, riding the wave of such fusion in the late 1980s and early 1990s: French dishes from his mother and Chinese cooking from his father, who kept a pantry stocked with soy sauce, fish sauce, fresh ginger, and Chinese mustard. Mr. Chin would add lemongrass to lobster bisque, and encrust scallops with candied ginger. A memorable dish at Philippe was called Quack, Quack, Quack — rare slices of magret of canard served against a pillar of duck risotto with a side of crispy duck wontons.

In 1981 at 18, he trained at L’Ecole Hoteliere de Paris and set out to cook at resorts — first in Deauville, three hours from Paris. Soon after, he joined a buddy on a trip to St. Martin in the Caribbean. While Mr. Chin was windsurfing, he later recalled, the wife of the resort owner, a model for Chanel, spotted him and urged her husband to hire him as the chef. Following a brief return to Normandy, Mr. Chin returned to Paris to work. At 24 in 1987, he got a call from Henri Noebes, who owned La Cocotte, a country-French restaurant in West Chester (now Ryan’s Pub), offering him the chef’s job. The proximity to the Poconos was a lure to Mr. Chin, who told The Inquirer in 1995 that he had once spent two months’ salary on a pair of skis.

Mr. Chin moved to Center City in 1989, first to work at Founders, the main room at the Hotel Atop the Bellevue, followed by a chef’s role at Restaurant 210 at the Rittenhouse Hotel, now Lacroix. “I had dinner with him last year, and he was the same guy since I hired him at Founders,” said chef Olivier Desaintmartin, who owned Caribou Cafe in Washington Square West for 20 years before selling it in 2023.

In 1992, at age 29, Mr. Chin ventured out on his own to open the posh, critically acclaimed Chanterelles, the onetime home of such French icons as La Panetière, Le Bec-Fin, Two Quails, and Ciboulette. Mr. Chin cut a dashing figure in leather as he tooled around Center City on his motorcycle, cementing his reputation as a bad-boy celebrity chef at the dawn of the Food Network era.

Back in the 1990s, chef Albert Paris co-owned Circa, then a hot spot at 1518 Walnut St. (and now a Levain Bakery). He and Mr. Chin, who never worked together, became friends. Paris called him “a walking contradiction of fun-loving tough guy, artist, and supportive friend. Not many people knew how kind and warm and beautiful Philippe was.”

In 1997, Mr. Chin became the youngest inductee at the time to the Maîtres Cuisiniers de France, the association of Master Chefs of France; he also was nominated for the James Beard Foundation’s Mid-Atlantic chef of the year. (A fellow Philadelphian, Susanna Foo, won that year.)

In 1999, after leaving Chanterelles, Mr. Chin opened the plush Philippe at the Locust Club, whose lounge was known as ChinChin. When it closed in 2001, he relocated to Augusta, Ga., where he operated Bambu at the Partridge Inn and opened a second restaurant in Aiken, S.C., called CuiZine. In 2008, he began as executive chef at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. That year, Mr. Chin was a key organizer of a sit-down banquet for 16,206 guests, setting a Guinness record. He later worked for a summer in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

In 2012, he moved to Somers Point to open Philippe Chin French-Asian Bistro & Deck Bar, now Tavern on the Bay. That is where he met his wife, who had friended him on Facebook. In their early chats, they realized that he had cooked the dinner for her wedding reception at the Rittenhouse Hotel in 1991.

In 2013, the couple moved to Lahaina, Hawaii, to open Sugarcane Maui, where they lived on the beach and he delighted in fishing. Also in Hawaii, he had triple bypass surgery, his wife said.

In 2016, when Bon Appetit was looking for an executive chef at Johns Hopkins, Mr. Chin “stood out for me and the rest of my team,” said Abdel Anane, a Bon Appetit executive. “He truly was one of a kind — a mentor and a leader,” Anane said. “He always brought joy and smiles to everyone around him.”

Besides his wife, he is survived by a brother, Thierry, and a niece. A celebration of life is being planned.