Seattle celebrity chef Thierry Rautureau (1958-2023) was known as “The Chef in The Hat” for wearing distinctive straw fedoras. Rautureau was born in France and did his early chef apprenticeship there before moving to the United States when he was twenty. In Seattle he became the chef and owner of Rover’s Restaurant in 1987, and later the owner and chef of restaurants Luc (opened 2010) and Loulay Kitchen & Bar (2013). He won many awards including a James Beard Award and France’s Chevalier de l’Ordre Du Mérite Agricole. Early on in his career, his wife Kathleen Encell-Rautureau gave him a fedora for Christmas which he started wearing all the time. One evening at Rover’s he came out to the dining room to speak to a guest and they exclaimed, “Look, it’s the Chef in the Hat!" The nickname stuck, and the fedora was incorporated into the signage of both Luc and Loulay.