Charles COULOMBEAU
Chef : 2 restaurants
If Charles Coulombeau is a chef, it's partly thanks to a basketball accident that broke his hand. " I wasn't able to write for three months, and dropped out of school completely," he explains. Raised by a father who loved cooking, he decided to take up the profession and joined a friend at the Biarritz hotel school. " When I did my first internship in the kitchen, I knew this was what I needed.
After an apprenticeship with the Ibarboure brothers in Bidart, where he met his partner, Roxane, he joined Maison Guérard in Eugénie-les-Bains, in the Landes region. There, he worked under Olivier Brulard, who became his mentor. " I was obsessed with technique, but he taught me that there's more to it than that, that management, psychology and mentality are just as important," confides the chef. After becoming a commis, he left at the age of 21 as chef de partie to join Maison Lameloise in Chagny.
A new adventure in 2016, this time in England: " Roxane and I wanted a change of scenery, so we went to Gravetye Manor. In the end, we stayed for three and a half years," he recounts. Then came the period of competitions, the National Chef of the Year, the Acorn Award and, in 2020, the apotheosis: he won the Taittinger, the famous international prize for cuisine d'auteur.
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