He’s a dream in the kitchen — and elsewhere in the house. He makes a mean cream-puff tower. And he’s got moves like Jagger.

Alas, Antonin Carême has been dead since the 1830s, but nobody’s perfect, right?

Most people have heard of Napoleon, but not many are familiar — even in France — with the story of this chef who cooked for him and his contemporaries, rising from a poor kitchen boy to become a standard-bearer of French cuisine. Now a new Apple TV+ period drama, “Carême,” argues that he was the very first celebrity chef. There’s even a “Top Chef” style cooking contest in front of a panel of judges.

But for the vibe, think “The Bear,” set in post-revolutionary Paris. Carême even directs his staff at one point to say “Oui, chef.” (And we could totally imagine him, like Jeremy Allen White, in a Calvin Klein underwear ad, if those had existed back then.)

The series, which dropped its first two episodes Wednesday, also shows how Carême wasn’t just a cook, or master pastry maker, or, well, sex god. We watch as he’s pulled into political intrigue by his boss, the cunning diplomat Talleyrand, and used as a spy.

Still, his goal was to be the best chef in the world. The show’s first season ends with an extraordinary outdoor coronation banquet that Carême creates for thousands of people. When he places, in triumph, a tall white chef’s hat on his head for the first time, it’s as if he’s crowning himself — and marking his ascent to celebrity.

Benjamin Voisin, who’s in virtually every scene, plays Carême with a scruffy head of hair, a gold earring and a bad-boy swagger that’s consciously based on Mick Jagger, circa ‘70s.

Director Martin Bourboulon says the choice for the role was obvious once Voisin walked into the audition room.

“When you find the right actor for the right part, 80% of the job is done,” he says. “We were very impressed with his youthful attitude but also his rock ‘n’ roll attitude. He is absolutely Carême in real life — very attractive for everyone, a young man who is maybe sometimes a bit insouciant, or careless.“

Perhaps not surprisingly, the show plays up the sex factor. The first scene sets the tone with Carême and his lover, Henriette, in a food-tasting session that morphs immediately into sex, but then duty calls: Napoleon’s soldiers are coming for dinner.

Bourboulon says that first scene was very intentional, establishing in a few minutes the three main themes of the series: food, sex and politics. Did we mention sex?

Of course, he wasn’t an accomplished chef, so Voisin was given intensive lessons.

“I spent two months in the kitchen to learn the customs of the great French tradition,” the actor says. He focused on learning how to realistically convey what Carême did best: invent dishes of wild whimsy, especially flamboyant dessert creations like a huge pyramid, or the “croquembouche” tower — a cascade of cream puffs. Carême is also known for inventing the vol-au-vent, an airy French pastry shell.

But even so, this master pastry maker can’t even chop an onion correctly when he arrives for work at his first big kitchen job. The job of teaching him falls to the talented sous-chef in Talleyrand’s kitchen, Agathe (Alice Da Luz).

Da Luz trained alongside Voisin on the kitchen brigade at the Ferrandi culinary school in Paris — and vastly improved her skill set. “We really learned the choreography of a kitchen, we really learned technique,” she says. “And today I can boast that I cut onions at a crazy speed.”

The show takes place shortly after Napoleon seized political power in 1799 and became first consul, on his way to later declaring himself emperor.

Voisin says he knew about “the victories and defeats of Bonaparte,” but had to learn from scratch the story of Carême.

As for costumes, some 1,000 of them were made from scratch, because the filmmakers had a specific vision of clothing that was not period-accurate but also not completely modern.

Then there was that crazy banquet that ends the season. The production created a giant tent covered with “an extraordinary amount of velvet,” and loaded down the tables with food, including a 132-pound leg of lamb and a 110-pound tuna.

They also made 5,000 cream puffs, assembled into grand, towering structures — befitting not only a new emperor but the world’s first celebrity chef.