Gregory Marchand’s cooking helped him survive an orphanage, impress Jamie Oliver and revolutionise the Paris restaurant scene. Now he’s opening in London
Two days after the St Denis siege, a Paris morning in the rain. The mood is subdued except at Joël Thiébault’s market stall where immaculately coiffured Paris matrons are jostling for the finest vegetables. The stall cascades with colour: fragrant flowering herbs, six styles of winter radish, six varieties of carrots, stunning spinach: “le prince de legumes”. Thiébault supplies Pierre Gagnaire and Hélène Darroze in London and many of the top chefs in Paris including Greg Marchand, chef-patron of Frenchie in the garment district near Les Halles. Marchand is used to buying the best produce in France and is a little concerned about suppliers for the Covent Garden branch of Frenchie he is opening on 2 February.
Marchand knows London well, perhaps as well as Paris, having worked here for much of his 20s: at the Savoy Grill, the Mandarin Oriental, the Electric and as head chef at Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen. It was Oliver who christened him Frenchie and whom he credits with his passion for produce and running a business. “I am lucky to have worked with successful people: Nick Jones, Jamie Oliver and Danny Meyer,” he says. “From Jamie I learnt about respect for ingredients, relationships with suppliers, relationships with staff.” The first dish Marchand cooked was escalope normande at his orphanage in Nantes when the chef had the weekend off. Marchand’s widowed mother had died when he was 12. He stood out, he says, with his long hair but the tougher kids protected him. He started culinary school at 16 and left the orphanage a year later. “Cooking was more about survival than anything else,” he says. “My passion came later. I had other things to sort out in life.”
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