When my clients ask me to define my cooking style, I always tell them that my techniques were first developed in my native France. As a young apprentice in the culinary world, an abundance of diverse fresh-farmed ingredients, meats, poultry, and fish provided the base of knowledge upon which inspiring cuisine could be created.

Trust me, this process of acquiring such knowledge takes months and years of patience and observation in the markets, and in restaurant kitchens. Over the years I have developed a preferred palette of ingredients and recipes.

My personal working table, or pantry, is a combination of several cultures that I have had the chance to discover on one or several occasions in my life. I had the opportunity as a child to spend two years, with my family, in the Republic of Laos. From that experience, we incorporated some aspects of Vietnamese cuisine into our family kitchen. My fascination with the lightness and simplicity of Asian cuisine continues to inspire me to this day.

There are two other important influences that have shaped my approach to cuisine: French Nouvelle Cuisine, and California Cuisine which followed. In the early eighties, I loved how the movement of French Nouvelle Cuisine balked at the traditional French, while taking great inspiration from the beautiful intensity of Japanese cuisine. My arrival in the United States was marked by the height of the California Cuisine movement, and the search for a truly American cuisine had begun.