William LEGROS

Chef : 1 restaurant Trained in front-of-house roles, William Legros now manages both the kitchen and the dining room at Touch'd'Art, his cozy little restaurant in the historic heart of Belfort.

Presentation

Looking back, William Legros can’t help but smile when he recalls his arrival at the CFA as a teenager: “When I started my training, there was no way I was going to do anything other than work in the dining room,” recalls the owner of Touch’d’Art in Belfort. “To me, it was the uncouth ones who worked in the kitchen.” The young man did indeed gain experience working front of house at various places, notably at the Château de Bournel golf club in the Doubs region, as well as at La Tariche in the Swiss Jura—a high-end campground restaurant. “ We were a small team, and that’s where I had my first experiences in the kitchen. We served a lot of trout from our fishpond; the cuisine was simple but respectable.”

COVID pushed him behind the stove

The young man then joined a golf course restaurant, still in Switzerland (the Mulligan, which no longer exists), where he discovered low-temperature cooking, which would become his trademark. He honed his skills without yet considering himself a true chef, but nonetheless opened his first restaurant in Belfort in late 2019. “I opened Fleur de Lys just a few weeks before the COVID outbreak. My plans were obviously thrown into disarray, and I found myself alone in my restaurant. There was no way I was going to throw in the towel, so I got to work in the kitchen—though I did get some help during the first few weeks from my former chef at the Mulligan.”

By late 2024, however, William Legros handed the reins over to a new team, which renamed Fleur de Lys “Touch’d’Art,” while he remained the owner of the restaurant located in Belfort’s historic center. “After a few months, when I had gone back to work in Switzerland, I had to face the facts: things just weren’t clicking with my successors. So I decided to take the reins again. ” His cuisine, centered on low-temperature cooking— “using an immersion heater rather than an oven,” he explains—is once again winning over the people of Belfort.