Cäsar Johann Ritz

Ritz was born 23 February 1850 in Niederwald in Valais, Switzerland, the youngest of thirteen children, to Johann "Anton" Ritz, a farmer, municipal president and justice of the peace, and Maria Creszentia (née Heinen), into a Catholic peasant family.

At the age of twelve he was sent as a boarder to the Jesuit college at Sion, and at fifteen, having shown only vaguely artistic leanings, was apprenticed as a sommelier at a hotel in Brig. While working there as an apprentice wine waiter he was dismissed by the patron of the hotel from his position, saying, "You'll never make anything of yourself in the hotel business. It takes a special knack, a special flair, and it's only right that I tell you the truth—you haven't got it." He returned briefly to the Jesuits as a sacristan, then left to seek his fortune in Paris at the time of the 1867 Universal Exhibition.

Ritz's formative five years in Paris, including the siege of 1870–71 during the Franco-Prussian War, gave him sufficient polish and confidence to transform himself from a waiter and general factotum into a maître d'hôtel, manager, and eventually hotelier. After a short stint working at the Hôtel de la Fidélité, he worked as a waiter in a workman's bistro and took a position in a prix fixe restaurant owned by the Chevallier family, where he was later dismissed for breaking too many dishes in his desire to work briskly. He worked his way up from assistant waiter to restaurant manager of a restaurant on the corner of Rue Royale and Rue Saint-Honoré, before working at the high-class Restaurant Voisin between 1869 and 1872. Here he waited on the likes of Sarah Bernhardt, George Sand, Edmond de Goncourt, Théophile Gautier, and Alexandre Dumas, learned the essentials of his trade from the owner, Bellenger, and served up dishes such as elephant's trunk in sauce chasseur as supplies of fresh meat dwindled during the siege and zoo animals took their place.

In 1872, Ritz became floor waiter of the Hôtel Splendide in Paris, which was one of the most lavish hotels in Europe at the time, where he met many rich, self-made Americans as guests who had a profound effect on him. In 1873 he was a waiter in Vienna at the time of the World's Fair, by which time he had begun to acquire a considerable knowledge of the industry and the culinary preferences of esteemed people such as the Prince of Wales.