Robb: Meet the Young Chef Bringing Opulent New Swagger to Paris’s Legendary Plaza Athénée
March 12, 2022
For three months last winter, chef Jean Imbert retreated to his cabin in Brittany to re-read the great classics of French gastronomy that he had studied early in his career. He pored over L’art de la cuisine française by Marie-Antoine Carême, the 19th-century chef who cooked for Napoleon I and dazzled the Paris elite with his towering dessert centerpieces, and Le guide culinaire by Auguste Escoffier, famous for codifying the kitchen brigade system.
But he also studied the contemporary recipes of chef Guillaume Gomez, who cooked for four presidents as the executive chef of the Élysée in France before being appointed an ambassador of gastronomy by President Emmanuel Macron last year. Imbert’s goal was straightforward, though hardly simple: “I wanted to understand, at a deeper level, what French cuisine is,” he says. “I tried to use this as a starting point for my reflection.”
