“Until that morning, I thought there was no such thing as bad!” : chef Paul Pairet reveals the food discovery that he is not ready to repeat!

In addition to his participation as a juror on the show Top chef, Paul Pairet is a French chef at the head of 4 establishments in Asia. Sailing between Paris and Shanghai where he spends two-thirds of the year, the chef spoke about his culinary tastes during an interview with Le Parisien.

Nostalgic flavors from his childhood, best restaurant addresses or even hated foods, the 59-year-old chef shared his preferences in terms of gastronomy. Find out what to remember from his interview!

If the chef cooks for others, he admits to having difficulty doing it for himself. As he explains, “I earn money by cooking and I lose it in other people’s restaurants! I eat everything, but there is a time for everything. On a daily basis, I draw inspiration from the tests I do for my restaurants.” His little guilty pleasure in Shanghai? Dim sum! “I love making a breakfast of small steamed bites. I’m crazy about ha kao, these shrimp ravioli with their snapping flesh!” he adds.

But what about in France? If the chef takes “as much pleasure with a beautiful pizza for 10 euros as with an ultra-technical plate for 100 euros in a great restaurant”, he likes to go to certain favorite addresses. “In Paris, I eat a lot of grilled food and I spend time in my restaurant Nonos,” explains the chef. If he has long been a fan of the Plaza Athénée (8th arrondissement) with Alain Ducasse and his cuisine based on naturalness, the chef recommends Pavyllon by Yannick Alléno, “a real “gastro” but faster”.

Finally, the restaurateur does not hesitate to highlight the flavors in these recipes. “When we put vinegar, we put it, when we go, we go,” he explains. The chef appreciates it when you really smell the scent of food: “I like things that are powerful, like anchovies, and I hate subtlety, which is often a screen for a lack of identity. The intensity level should be a cook’s marker.

But be careful, the chef doesn’t like everything. A product consumed in Australia particularly marked the cook: vegemite, a type of fermented yeast. “The first time I went to Australia, I was greeted by two very nice girls. For breakfast, they made me a toast with fermented yeast… It was hard. Until that morning, I thought that bad things didn’t exist!”, recalls the restaurateur.