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CELEBRITY CHEF


A Great British love affair


The nation’s favourite French chef Jean-Christophe Novelli talks to Haute Cuisine about his passion for the land of beans on toast, tells why Keith Floyd was like a father to him and shares his recipe for success


INTERVIEW: RACHAEL LLOYD W


hen the young Jean-Christophe Novelli came to London, there were “probably fewer than ten” Michelin-starred restaurants in the UK – and they were mostly French. Already a skilled baker and


cake-maker, who had been working in kitchens in his native France, one would imagine that Jean-Christophe would have been snapped up like freshly baked croissant. But it wasn’t quite that simple. “I went round knocking on doors but none of the French restaurants


wanted to give me a job,” says Jean-Christophe, 49, in a melodic accent that a journalist once described as centipede crawling up a xylophone. “Back then, if you wanted to work in a Michelin-starred restaurant you had to have a letter of recommendation from the right person or come from a family who knew the right people. There was snobbery. That’s why I left France in the first place, there was nothing for me there.” Jean-Christophe was born in Arras, in the


chef”, choosing Blighty – home of over-salted fish and chips, baked beans on toast and fatty steak and kidney pies – over a country that boasts some of the finest cuisine in the world seems, frankly, barking. “Come on, honestly, you cannot say that British food was bad.


This is not fair,” he says, earnestly. “I would get invited to people’s houses for dinner and I had some lovely stews and dumplings. “People say, ‘Jean-Christophe – is 27 years in the UK not long


north of the country. His mother, Monique, was a seamstress and his father, Jean, an electrician. He left school at 14 to join a bakery before becoming the private chef to the French branch of the Rothschilds. In the UK his first job was as a chef in the New Forest. “I loved it,” he says. “I never imagined what my future would be; I just enjoyed being in the kitchen.” During his 20s he worked for the late Keith Floyd at his gastropub,


The Maltsters Arms in Devon, and the very subject of the charismatic bon-viveur is enough to bring a tear to Jean-Christophe’s Bambi eyes. “I lived with him and his ex-wife in a cottage in Devon. He was like a father to me. If I was coming in late from work he’d always have food and a glass of wine on the table for me.” So began a love affair with “Great Britain” as Monsieur Novelli


affectionately calls it, that has spanned over two decades. Yet, the irony of Jean-Christophe, now dubbed “the nation’s favourite French


44


I’D BE DOING NOW. I WOULD PROBABLY NOT EVEN BE A CHEF’


HATE TO THINK WHAT


ENGLAND HAS I OFFERED ME. IF


‘I LOOK AT WHAT WAS IN FRANCE I


enough?’ But coming here was my dream, even as a boy,” says the Michelin and 5AA Rosette award-winning chef. “I love Great Britain. I want to die here. I love the football, the red letter boxes and the taxis. I speak from my heart.” After winning his first Michelin star at Le


Provence restaurant in Lymington, Hampshire, Novelli became head chef at London’s Four Seasons Hotel. In 1986, with the help of his close friend Marco Pierre White, he opened his first restaurant, Maison Novelli in Clerkenwell, East London. Then came other restaurants, such as Les Saveurs in Mayfair and The Cellars in South Africa. Bankruptcy followed in 1999 but Jean-Christophe started over again. He now runs the Novelli Academy from his 14th-century farmhouse near


Luton, Hertfordshire, ranked as one of the world’s best cookery schools. “I look at what England has offered me. It gave me the chance to


express myself, to make mistakes, to progress myself,” Jean-Christophe says. “If I was in France I hate to think what I’d be doing now. I would probably not even be a chef.” With two marriages behind him, from the first of which he has a


24-year-old daughter, Christina, Jean-Christophe now lives with his fiancée, Michelle Kennedy, and their two-year-old son, Jean Frankie Patrick. “I’m so happy. And I will pass on to him my love for Great Britain and its wonderful food – don’t worry about that.” Turn the page for one of Jean-Christophe’s Great British recipes.


HC


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