The world of cuisine is in mourning, after losing one of its most famous representatives, Marie-Thérèse Ordonez, better known as Maïté, disappeared this Saturday, December 21, 2024 at the Rion-des-Landes EHPAD. For years, accompanied by Micheline Banzet-Lawton, she highlighted traditional southwestern cuisine in her shows. The kitchen of the musketeers et A table !both broadcast in the 80s and 90s on France 3. This warm woman with an inimitable accent leaves behind cult sequences like the famous eel scene, and recipes as improbable as few veganranging from XXL hamburgers to coypu terrine, including ostrich steak.
A sudden disappearance which raised in its wake a wave of tributes, starting with that ofEmmanuel Macron, the President of the Republic, who clarified on X that Maïté was a “ambassador of our traditional cuisine, [une] popular icon, [une] source of inspiration for so many families.” Boris Vallaud, deputy for Landes, told her that she was a “endearing and generous personality, [une] figure of Landes culture and [un] symbol of rural gastronomy.” Representative of the new generation of TV chefs, Cyril Lignacalso took the time to thank her predecessor in an Instagram story: “Your good humor, your good cooking that we shared at your home with my parents, I will never forget.”
Details of Maïté’s funeral
As the years passed, this authentic Landes woman, who never left her native village of Rion-des-Landes, remained close to her roots. She decides, voluntarily, to leave the PAF in the 2000s, wanting to spend time with family and devote time to their restaurant At Maïtéopened in 1998 and closed in 2015. The same year, her granddaughter Camille, also a chef in her spare time and a former Top Chef candidate, explained her famous grandmother's choice to move away from the cameras: “She is doing well, she is enjoying her retirement and her family. She no longer wants to answer interviews or do television, it's no longer her thing. It's a desire on her part to fade away like her the fact, she no longer has the same interests. She prefers to stay with her family.
Entrenched in the peaceful and sunny world of her childhood region, Maïté was confronted with the tragedies of life, losing his only son Serge in 2013, struck down by cancer, then her husband, the faithful Jean-Pierre Ordenez, known as “Pierrot”, in 2020. Despite the pain, the former TV presenter was able to spend her old days in anonymity, withdrawn into an EHPAD, apparently being affected by Alzheimer's disease, according to information shared by the mayor of his commune, Laurent Civel, on BFMTV. He is in fact talking about a neurodegenerative disease “which we know only too well, and which takes away immediate memories”.
The leaden screed carefully placed on her daily life by Jean-Pierre Coffe's former rival is in the process of being lifted as new information reaches us. The day after his death, we learned, thanks to our colleagues at Southwest, what the grandmother of Camille and Perrine will rest with her family in the Rion-des-Landes cemetery, following a funeral which will be organized this Thursday, December 26. Laurent Civel added, at the microphone of BFM TV, that the missing “obviously wanted to be in his commune and to end his life journey in Rion-des-Landes”.
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