When the French government released its comprehensive list of the world’s best restaurants in December, New York’s famed Per Se came in second. Tokyo’s insanely exclusive Kyo Aji took home third.

The top spot instead went to the much lesser-known Le Restaurant de l’Hotel de Ville.

The surprise victory suddenly thrust the Swiss restaurant’s young and debonair chef, Benoit Violier, into the international spotlight, hailed in the media as “the world’s best chef.”

At just 44 years old, Violier had a boyish face, a young family and a new, state-of-the-art kitchen. And he had already spent a quarter-century in some of the best restaurants on the planet. A perfectionist, he stressed that nothing in the cutthroat business of haute cuisine could be taken for granted.

“The strictness about myself always has to increase more and more,” he once told a restaurant guide. “Nothing can be definitively acquired; everything must be done all over again every day.”

On Sunday, Violier was found dead in his home in Crissier, Switzerland.

His apparent suicide has shocked the restaurant world and sown confusion about why he would kill himself a month after being crowned the best chef in the world.

Some of his closest friends offered an answer, though, speculating that the intense stress of running one of the planet’s greatest restaurants suddenly overwhelmed the young chef just as he struggled to cope with the double loss of his father and his closest culinary mentor.

“I am appalled, absolutely destroyed,” Pierre Keller, a wine merchant who shared a drink with Violier 10 days ago, told Swiss newspaper 24 Heures. “It takes a lot of pressure to do that.”

Running even the smallest restaurant is often an extremely stressful business, and the industry is rife with broken dreams and bankruptcies.

The rarefied world of haute cuisine can be especially cruel. Here, the margin between success and failure can be as fine as a single, powerful critic’s review. And coveted ratings, such as Michelin stars, can literally mean life or death for a chef.

Violier’s Hotel de Ville was one of only two restaurants in Switzerland to attain Michelin’s elusive three-star rating. Worldwide, only about 100 restaurants manage the feat a year.

“For three stars you have to be scared, you have to feel the adrenaline rush,” said award-winning French chef Yannick Alléno in Three Stars, a documentary about the intense pressure in the industry. “That’s how it must be when you’re cooking.”

Violier seemed to acknowledge, even thrive under, the pressure-cooker atmosphere of being a top chef.

“It’s my life,” he said in a 2014 interview with Swiss television station RTS. “I go to sleep with cooking. I wake up to cooking.”

Violier was born in the small town of Saintes, Charente-Maritime, in southwestern France. He grew up hunting with his father, and as a chef often made French game the centerpiece of his meals.

Violier moved to Paris to pursue his passion for cooking in 1991, according to his 2015 Michelin write-up. He worked for one top chef after another, including “Chef of the Century” Joel Robuchon, who would later list Hotel de Ville as one of his favourites.

In 1996, Violier moved to the tiny town of Crissier, Switzerland, just outside Lausanne, to become chef Philippe Rochat’s right-hand man.

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Sixteen years later, Violier succeeded Rochat, taking charge of the three-star restaurant in emphatic style.

But Violier went beyond his predecessors. He obsessed over providing visitors with the freshest of local foods, cooked simply but to studied perfection. His menu changed daily, sometimes hourly, depending on what was available, yet his standards were sky high.

“It reflects our generation,” he said of his simplified yet almost scientific technique. “We try to be as accurate as possible. It’s crucial in a refined gastronomy you get to the point you can’t refine it any further.”

His hyperintense, hyper-local approach quickly paid off. He earned the approval of powerful French critic Gilles Pudlowski. Then Gault et Millau, second in importance only to Michelin, named Violier Switzerland’s “Chef of the Year” in 2013.

Then came the moment that would vault the wunderkind into the spotlight, with all its glory and its glare.

In December, La Liste, an algorithmic ranking system put out by the French Foreign Ministry and tourism board, named Hotel de Ville the best restaurant in the world, narrowly beating out Per Se.

What should have been the best moment in Violier’s life was darkened, though, by the back-to-back deaths just months before of his father — to whom he dedicated a 1,000-page book of European wildfowl — and Rochat, his culinary mentor, who died in a cycling accident.

Violier was “badly shaken” by their deaths, 24 Heures reported. “What resorts did he take to join them?”

On Sunday, Violier was found dead at his Crissier home in what police said was an apparent suicide.

The weapon was one of Violier’s hunting shotguns, the Guardian reported.

His death shocked many of his friends, who saw no signs of the flawless chef cracking under pressure, either personally or professionally.

“Everything was fine when I saw him last week,” Pierre Henchoz, a friend who travelled the world on culinary missions with Violier, told the newspaper. “The restaurant has a reservation book filled to the brim for three months.”

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