Jean-François FOUCHER

Presentation

Jean-François Foucher's career began in 1987, at the age of 15. After two years with Alain Chapel in Mionnay (Ain), he moved to Tours to join Jean Bardet's team at Château Belmont. In 1995, the Bordelais moved to Honfleur, to the Ferme Saint Siméon inn. "There werethree restaurants to manage, so it was a different kind of organization," he recalls.

But the chef had a hankering for adventure. So he flew to Saint-Barthélemy and his restaurant François Plantation. He then headed for the continent, to the Saint Regis Lespinasse hotel in Washington, then to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he joined the Hyatt group. After a few months at the Hyatt Regency Osaka in Japan, he returned to France in 2002 as head pastry chef for the opening of the Park Hyatt Paris-Vendôme.

While on vacation, he fell in love with the Cotentin region. "I was walking around and saw a patisserie for sale in Cherbourg. I asked the price and bought it," he says. That's how his first patisserie, JFF, opened in 2010, followed by a second in 2014, in Deauville, and a third in 2018, in Neuilly. The chef even made it into Gault&Millau's Top 10 of France's best patisseries in 2017. More recently, Jean-François Foucher opened Pain Paulette."We make an old-fashioned pastry with organic sourdough bread and flour from La Manche."He also won the Pâtissier Normandie Gault&Millau 2023 trophy:"It's a pleasure for me and my teams to know that we're still in the running," he enthuses.

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