Become Londoners: culinary star’s advice to French chefs

The winner of the first major restaurant award of the year says the new generation of French chefs need to “understand Londoners” before they can taste success in the capital.

Parisian Gregory Marchand, Chef Propriétaire at Covent Garden’s Frenchie, where the three-course lunch menu costs £29, was speaking after collecting the BMW Square Meal Restaurant of the Year 2016.

He said that too many French chefs assumed that “doing delicious food” was enough. Pioneers of the Eighties and Nineties such as Albert Roux and Pierre Koffmann were able to win accolades when London’s culinary reputation was at a low, but the capital has since become the world’s most competitive gastronomic city.

Marchand said: “To open a restaurant in London today, doing delicious food isn’t enough, you must speak the city language fluently, slang included. You need to understand Londoners and there is no better way to do that than to have lived here most of your twenties.” Marchand spent much of the Noughties working in London at the Savoy Grill, the Mandarin Oriental, the Electric and as head chef at Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen.

He opened his first Frenchie in Paris in 2009 before returning to London last year. Dishes on the Anglo-French menu include duck foie gras, eel, beetroot & horseradish snow and salt crust roasted celeriac, and black truffle & seeds crumble. Several “big name” Paris restaurateurs have struggled after launching here.

Mayfair’s Le Chabanais closed in September 2015 after six months. A Shepherd Market branch of Parisian celebrity haunt Ferdi has had a lukewarm reception since opening last month.

Square Meal editor Ben McCormack said: “Frenchie is a great London story. A French chef who spent the Noughties working in London takes that style to Paris where it is a huge success, before returning to the city that formed his vision to repeat that success.”