Jasper White, inventive chef who helped put Boston on the culinary map, has died – The Boston Globe

“My grandmother was Italian, and she would sit and talk to me for hours about food,” Mr. White recalled. “She had a huge garden, and everything was always fresh. When I was going to spend the weekend with my granny, I would usually talk to her on Wednesday or Thursday, and we’d plan the menu for the weekend. She was my inspiration.”

Mr. White, whose Restaurant Jasper expanded Boston’s idea of elegant dining in the 1980s, and whose Summer Shack was just as memorable, if much more casual, in the past quarter century, has died.

Two of his close friends — Lydia Shire and Gordon Hamersley, both well-known chefs themselves — confirmed his death to the Globe. Additional information, including the age of Mr. White, who was born in 1954, was not immediately available.

“My real love for food is eating,” he told the Globe in 1997.

Generations of diners, meanwhile, loved going to his signature restaurants.

“I was part of a group of chefs that, in the early ‘80s, nationwide, started the American cuisine movement,” he said in 1997. “Prior to that, American chefs received very little respect from the American press.”

Restaurant critics praised his work and organizations conferred honors, including the James Beard Foundation, which named him the best chef in the Northeast region in 1991, when he was running his namesake Boston restaurant that became known simply as Jasper’s.

He also was a Beard Award nominee for best chef in 1994, and in 2001, the foundation named Summer Shack a best new restaurant nominee.

Writing in The New York Times that year, Nina Simonds noted that Mr. White was “considered the dean of American fish cookery by many.”

Before opening Restaurant Jasper in autumn 1983, Mr. White made the rounds of banks and lenders to secure financing. Then he renovated a space on Commercial Street in the North End.

With room for some 75 patrons, Jasper’s became so popular so quickly that weekends were soon booked a month in advance.

“If Jasper White, owner-chef of this restaurant, isn’t careful, Restaurant Jasper could end up among the best New England restaurants serving American haute cuisine,” Globe food critic Anthony Spinazzola wrote in a four-star review not long after opening night. “He’s certainly started out on the right foot.”

A decade later, Boston magazine anointed Jasper’s Boston’s best seafood restaurant in 1993, saying that “the quality is unbeatable and no one prepares it better than Jasper White.”

“Until Jasper’s, it was hard to find an elegant, fish-centric restaurant in town,” Hamersley told the Globe in 2018. “Jasper White’s food was very simple and very elegant, and I tried to cook this way when I opened my restaurant.”

In the 1989 Globe interview, Mr. White said he had broadened New England cooking “by not sticking to strictly Yankee cooking.”

“It’s certainly a part of New England, but besides the Yankees, there are the Portuguese, Greeks, Italians, Irish, Chinese, and Eastern Europeans,” he added, interviewed inside his North End dining room. “In addition, there are the migrations of people from Southeast Asia and Central America who are now bringing their native products into local markets.”

A son of Irish and Italian parents, Mr. White had little problem mixing cultures and cuisines.

He passed along his knowledge in the books he wrote, which include “Jasper White’s Cooking from New England,” “Lobster at Home,” “Fifty Chowders,” and “The Summer Shack Cookbook — The Complete Guide to Shore Food.”

In the late 1990s, he took a hiatus from running restaurants and was a consultant to Legal Sea Foods.

“He certainly enhanced our culinary operation — without a doubt,” Roger Berkowitz, former chief executive of Legal Sea Foods, said Saturday night. Mr. White encouraged Berkowitz to place chefs in every one of the chain’s restaurants, “as opposed to kitchen managers.”

Opening Summer Shack at the beginning of the 2000s, Mr. White created a different dining experience than his North End restaurant — launching first at a Cambridge location, a short walk from the MBTA’s Alewife Red Line Station. It was a hit that lent itself to expansion.

“Jasper White opened Summer Shack at Alewife in 2000 and expanded to the Back Bay and Mohegan Sun. Now there’s a Shack pop-up in Harvard Square outside the Charles Hotel,” Sheryl Julian, the Globe’s former food editor, wrote in 2021.

Summer Shack, the Globe’s Kara Baskin wrote in 2019, was a “family-friendly cavern, and his culinary celebrity helped to lure curious urbanites, older locals, and relieved suburban parents, delighted that there was finally a place — in Cambridge! Run by a real chef! — where children could romp among the lobster tanks and picnic tables while they ate a better-than-decent meal with their hands.”

Such a setting wasn’t entirely surprising, coming from a chef who developed his tastes in family settings.

“I wouldn’t call myself a traditional cook,” he said in 1989, “but I find myself going back to classic dishes and classic food combinations.”

Mr. White grew up in New Jersey, where en route to becoming a rock star restaurateur he crossed paths with a more straightforward rock star. He and Bruce Springsteen, a few years apart in age, both attended Freehold High School.

After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., Mr. White set off on a restaurant odyssey, telling the Globe that he cooked in nine states over the course 11 years.

In the roughly 48 months between his arrival in Boston and when he opened Restaurant Jasper, his chef duties included Cafe Plaza in the Copley Plaza Hotel, the Parker House, and Seasons in the Bostonian hotel, and his colleagues included Shire.

“Chefs such as Todd English, Gordon Hamersley, Barbara Lynch, Lydia Shire, and Jasper White created plenty of Boston buzz as they rose to renown,” Globe restaurant critic and food writer Devra First noted in 2018.

While he was at the Bostonian, he met Julia Child through Shire, and they became friends. “I was pleasantly surprised at the way she received us and how supportive she was,” he wrote in a 2011 essay posted on WickedLocal. And when he opened Jasper’s, “Julia and her husband, Paul, became regular customers, when they were staying in town.”

Jasper’s put him on the map locally, regionally, and nationally.

“Restaurateur Jasper White’s cuisine is daring in its simplicity,” Julian wrote in 1989 as she praised “Jasper White’s Cooking from New England,” which he published that year.

“Thankfully, White never suffered from the young chefs’ syndrome of having to prove all they know in each dish by presenting too many flavors,” she added. “Rather, he always understates his point, allowing the quality of each ingredient to shine, not interfering too much with foods that are splendid on their own.”

Mr. White closed Jasper’s in 1995, knowing that his restaurant would be trying to attract customers in the shadow of Big Dig construction. He also stepped away to spend more time with his family — his children in particular.

“I had overheard my 4-year-old daughter refer to me as ‘that guy’ as I was leaving the house one morning,” he said in 1997. “It was a slap in the face I think I needed.”

A complete list of Mr. White’s survivors and information about a memorial gathering were not available.

After closing Jasper’s, writing cookbooks, and serving as a consultant, Mr. White conceived of Summer Shack, which like so much else in his life harkened back to his own beginnings.

“I did fine dining for 25 years, appealing to a really limited audience,” he told the Globe in 1997, a few years before launching Summer Shack. “There’s a part of me, because I’m from a working-class family, that wanted to start cooking for other types of people and for children.”

Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.