Restaurant L’Ô des Vignes

Where are you from ? I am originally from the Mâconnais region, I come from a small village called Tramayes. It's not very far from Solutré, but there are no more vineyards, only goats! Why this job? What is your background ? The kitchen came about initially a little bit out of desperation. Initially I wanted to work in nature, I grew up in Tramayes, I hiked everywhere, I was rather destined to work outdoors. I wasn't a bad student, but I didn't want to wear out my trousers on school benches. My brother had a restaurant in Bourg-en-Bresse, I used to help him in the kitchen every weekend, I really enjoyed it, and I told myself at that moment that I was going to become a chef. So I enrolled at the hotel school in Mâcon. I continued with an apprenticeship (yes, I did things a bit backwards!) in Tournus at a hotel-restaurant called L'Hôtel de la Paix. Then the Army, after the Army it was off to Lyon, to Paul Bocuse's place. After that it was England: London and Nottingham, for a little over a year and a half. I had the opportunity to open a restaurant in Tokyo, Japan. That profoundly affected me, both in my cooking and in my daily life. I really, really, really loved it! After returning to France, having been awarded MOF in 2007, I went to work in luxury hotels in Switzerland. Why here? When I turned 40, I got a bit fed up and said to myself, "I'm stopping, I want to go home." Fuissé is well situated, and I have always had a strong love of wine. Fuissé is a wine-growing village nestled in the arms of the mountain, in the heart of a natural cirque. I found the place by chance: in 2012, I was in Cannes, and my father called me to tell me that there was something for sale in Fuissé. It was already a restaurant, it was called "Au Pouilly-Fuissé". During a visit to my parents, I took the car, went to see the place, and there I fell in love! Everything had been closed for a year, the courtyard was overgrown, it was dirty but the place attracted me. In Geneva there were 45 cooks, then I worked in a team of 17 cooks, today we do something smaller, purer, we really want to get to the heart of the matter, to remove all the artifice. And as we get older, we realize that some things we loved when we were young were useless. It's a return to simplicity: the product, knowing how to work with it, in a refined way. That's also why I really enjoyed my experience in Japan. In my home, anything that serves no purpose has no place. Today we are happy with this arrangement. We build respectable relationships of trust with our suppliers, which allows us to have exceptionally fresh and high-quality products every day; this is how our cuisine is built. Your favorite place on the Grand Site? There's a place I really like, it's when you go up to the Grange du Bois, you have a great view of the Grand Site. We have the Roche de Solutré in the foreground, but we can see the whole Grand Site. And it's a peaceful place. Your best memory on the Grand Site? It's about coming back to wander around the places of my childhood, on the Roche, like when I was a kid, and doing it now with my son. These are powerful moments!