For almost as long as he’s been a chef, Antoine Bouterin has put equal energy into a quiet hobby. Visiting flea markets around the world, he has built up piece-by-piece a comprehensive and exquisitely detailed antique toy collection.

“From my earliest memory I was always cooking, so becoming a chef seemed natural, but toys were my secret addiction,” he said.

When Mr. Bouterin first arrived in New York in January 1980, he had already amassed the sort of dreamy Parisian résumé that brings to mind the recent animation hit “Ratatouille.” Hailed by the French magazine Il as the “Best Young Chef of France” before his 21st birthday, he thrived in Paris’s whirlwind culinary golden age of the 1970s, and it wasn’t long before he became a bright star in the New York City restaurant firmament.

Slated for the head chef post at President Reagan’s White House, Mr. Bouterin was instead lured by George Briguet, owner of the upscale restaurant Le Périgord, where for 14 years Mr. Bouterin delighted the palates of A-listers and food critics alike. In 1995, he opened Bouterin in Manhattan, where gastronomes experienced French cooking in the rustic setting of an aristocratic farmhouse, cementing Mr. Bouterin’s status as a press darling and earning him the American Culinary Institute’s “Best Chef of the Year” in the city in 2003.

Mr. Bouterin’s passion for toys began in childhood. Growing up on a small farm in postwar southern France, he said toys were the one element absent from an otherwise happy upbringing.

“After the war, toys were simply not available, especially where I grew up. You had to create your own games. … I would always play chef and pretend to feed people in my own restaurant from herbs I would find in the garden,” he said.

Although it comprises hundreds of thousands of individual pieces, Mr. Bouterin’s collection is housed entirely in his 800-square-foot Upper East Side apartment, on Park Avenue. Like a museum curator, he displays and catalogs the collection with precision.

At first glance, the apartment appears chock full of antique marionettes dangling from lushly sweeping velvet curtains. Hundreds of storybook characters, model sets, semi-porcelain dolls, and miniatures gaze from behind custom-installed Lucite display cases. Included in the mix is a full chorus of Disney characters and celebrity dolls, among them Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, and Sonny and Cher. And this is just the foyer.

Further in, the collection’s sheer expanse and intricacy begins to defy description. Mr. Bouterin owns toys that span from 1860 to 1970, with a few items from the 1980s. On view is a full set of “Star Wars” miniatures, replicas of every “Ghostbusters” character, and a veritable James Bond retrospective.

A number of the most notable pieces are mise-en-scènes, a majority of which are, unsurprisingly, food-related: 1920s restaurant interiors, mid-century European kitchens, even an American Old West-style grocery store. Others include a circa 1900 zoo, a rural schoolhouse interior, and dozens of tongue-in-cheek vignettes of modern domestic bliss.

Mr. Bouterin has also created his own, equally impressive mise-en-scènes — a 16th-century court’s scullery kitchen, a late Victorian salon, a plush Chinese dollhouse interior, a monk’s library — each of which involved hours of painstaking, surgical handcrafting.

He has a soft spot for turn-of-the-century puppet theaters and other early forms of popular entertainment. One of his favorite and most valuable toys is a series of 1920s tin orchestra musicians that play in unison when wound up.

“You can see how the idea of leisure changed over time, as well as what people were preoccupied with,” Mr. Bouterin said. “In the earlier years there’s generally a lot more sweetness, more concern with domestic order. After World War II there seems to be an interest in careers, modern life, and machines, and in the later years you get more monsters, more weapons.”

To prove his point, he digs up a circa 1950s “proto-computer” learning game, called “Robot Sam,” in which electrically charged prongs determine the correct answers to questions. For Mr. Bouterin, the materials used in making toys over the decades are another aspect of the collection’s anthropological value.

“Early in the century, toys were really only accessible to the very wealthy, so they were all very expensively made, using highquality materials,” he said. “It’s also why pieces from the 1890s are even more rare and valuable.”

He then opens the apartment’s only built-in closet to show racks of doll clothing, fans, umbrellas, rattles, and trinkets hanging on antique doll hangers. There are tiny porcelain and glass tea sets with even tinier cutlery, boxed games from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, more marionettes, and phalanxes of soldiers and figurines.

Even the bedroom is primarily given over to toys, with wooden figurine sets, carriages, doll-houses, and exotic landscape models. Under a narrow, compact desk are more boxes and files filled with everything doll-size: buttons, socks, linens, and handkerchiefs, all meticulously ordered and maintained.

Mr. Bouterin said he looks forward to the day when he can transfer ownership of his collection to another collector or organization so that more people can experience it. “So more children can see it and learn what their ancestors played with and what was important in different decades,” he said. “Children, in particular, love to notice how the materials change, too. In fact, I think a lot of the toys manufactured today are replicas of antique toys, or borrow from their color schemes and ideas.”

Asked how hard it will be to part with his collection after living with it for so long in such close quarters, Mr. Bouterin thinks for a moment before answering. “It was a privilege to enjoy this, and it was definitely a big part of my life for many years, so in some ways it will break my heart,” he said. “But there is a time in your life when you accumulate and then a time when you begin to clear things out. And anyway, another big part of my life has always been sharing with people, so I know this is the right thing to do.”