Jacky RIBAULT

Chef : 2 restaurants

Presentation

"I come from a family where there were seven of us at the table, and my father was very good at cooking with produce from our farm", remembers Jacky Ribault. With his CAP in his pocket and his apprenticeships completed, he was hired at La Fontaine aux Perles, in Rennes... where he found himself by chance replacing the chef in the kitchen.

After his military service at the Officers' Mess in Paris, he moved to Chamonix to become sous-chef at La Sapinière. " Maurice Boisier taught me a lot about pastry, but his bible was Antonin Carême," he recalls. Two years after his arrival, he headed for Zurich, Switzerland, to work at the Hotel Ermitage. He returned to Paris a year later and worked for a few months as an extra.

Finally, he landed a job at Alain Passard's Arpège. He stayed there for three years, then moved to Lyon, to the bistro La Grille. He went on to work at Le Taillevent, under Philippe Legendre, before joining the kitchens of the Hôtel Balzac when it closed in August 1997. "Seeing Gagnaire and cooking with him was crazy! That same year, Pierre Hermé opened a Ladurée boutique on the Champs-Élysées. After three unsuccessful interviews, Jacky Ribault made him an offer: "I told him, 'I'd work for you at any salary, and I'd do three-hour shifts'." He was hired.

Two years later, this "pastry chef at heart" became head pastry chef at the Alcazar in Paris. Missing the kitchen, he joined the Shozan for a year and a half. In 2001, he helped open another Shozan in Florence (Italy), then took the helm at Tsé, a Chinese restaurant at Porte d'Auteuil.

Several restaurant openings and a motorcycle accident later, he remembers his dream of having his own restaurant. This became a reality in 2010, when he acquired Qui Plume La Lune, in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, and again in 2018, with L'Ours, his restaurant in Vincennes. A third establishment, Les Mérovingiens, in Noisy-le-Grand, completes the picture in 2021. More recently, in 2022, Jacky Ribault became the proud owner of a bakery-butchery, Suzanne et Lucien, in Noisy-le-Grand. He would like to continue his expansion by opening a brasserie in Saint-Ouen in the near future.

I. B.