Henry Haller
Unflappable White House chef who catered for five presidents
HENRY HALLER, who has died aged 97, was a Swiss-born chef who served as Executive Chef of the White House from 1966 to 1987 and worked for five presidents, from Lyndon B Johnson to Ronald Reagan.
His duties ranged from rustling up dinner for 1,300 (with just a week’s notice), to celebrate the signing of the Camp David Accords in 1978, to making tuna sandwiches for Amy Carter’s school lunch box, and from meeting LBJ’S constant demands for “more tapioca pudding” to dealing with Nancy Reagan’s insistence on fancy menus with different colour combinations.
The job came with its challenges. “Presidents don’t have much time,” Haller once explained, “so if you have a soufflé, the president doesn’t wait for the soufflé, the soufflé waits for the president. You pop a couple in the oven at different times, then boom, when the butler comes in, you have one ready.”
The famously unflappable Haller weathered President Johnson’s temper tantrums and refused to have his nose put out of joint when the King of Saudi Arabia turned up with his own food in five briefcases – and his own food taster.
But over the years, he told an audience in 2005, he found out that cooking for Democratic presidents involved more work because they tended to be less selective than Republicans about whom they would invite to dinner: “The Democrats like everybody – the truck drivers and electricians and so on.”
Johnson tended to eat alone at odd hours, and expected his food – his favourite was roast rib of beef on the bone – to be on the table as soon as he sat down; Nixon, by contrast, counted calories, preferred fish, vegetables and low-fat cottage cheese – and mixed his own martinis before dinner; Ford would “eat everything”, his favourite dish being pork chops with red cabbage; Carter was frugal, preferring meatloaf, macaroni cheese – and fried chicken on Wednesdays; Reagan wanted low-calorie but elaborate meals.
“The people from the South, Carter and Johnson, liked repetition,” Haller noted, “and the repertoire for them was really not as big as for the Nixons and Reagans.”
Highlights of Haller’s time at the White House included the massive wedding cake he made for Tricia Nixon, and the dinner he prepared during Nixon’s presidency for 1,300 prisoners of war back from Vietnam. He regarded his greatest culinary triumph as a lobster mousse he made for a visit by the French prime minister Jacques Chirac in 1986.
“If a guy wants to come in here and be a prima donna, forget it,” Haller observed of his role. “My challenge is to keep everyone happy.”
Henry Haller was born in Altdorf, Switzerland, in 1923 and began his apprenticeship aged 16 at the Park Hotel, Davos. After the war he went to Canada as vegetable cook at the Montreal Ritz-carlton, moving in 1953 to the US, where he eventually wound up commanding a staff of 60 at the Ambassador Hotel in Manhattan.
Lyndon Johnson had stayed at the hotel as vice president, and when, at the end of 1965, the Kennedyera White House Executive Chef René Verdon resigned after a Texan “food coordinator” hired by Johnson began to supply him with canned and frozen vegetables (and after he was asked to prepare a cold chickpea purée, a dish he detested), Haller applied for the job.
In 21 years at the White House, Haller planned and prepared more than 250 state dinners. In retirement, he developed recipes for Cointreau, advised a supermarket chain and published The White House Family Cookbook (1988), a gastronomic tour through five administrations.
Henry Haller married, in 1954, Carole Itjen, with whom he had two sons and two daughters.
Henry Haller, born 1923, death announced November 9 2020