Michelin-star French chef Guillaume Galliot on working 18 hours a day, his move to Asia and making his mother proud
- Galliot turned down a better-paying job in Miami to go to Raffles in Singapore and at 25 found himself chef de cuisine at Raffles Beijing, he tells Bernice Chan
- After a stint in Macau, he moved to Hong Kong ‘because it’s more competitive’ and within a year had earned Caprice at the Four Seasons a third Michelin star
How did you get into cooking? “My parents divorced when I was 10 years old and my mum raised my older sister, brother and me. We lived in Chambray-lès-Tours, in France’s Loire Valley, and my mum had to take the train early in the morning for a two-hour commute to Paris and back every day for work for 18 years.
“I ate lunch in the school canteen but the food was terrible. When I was 12 years old I asked my mum if I could go home and make lunch, because we lived 200 metres from school. I made simple things like pasta, steak and omelette.
“I learned how to cook by myself: boil the water for pasta, then open the packet for the sauce. By the time I was 15, I started skipping classes. I was too young to work, but I went to restaurants and asked if I could peel carrots and watch what they were doing in the kitchen. A year later I went to cooking school, where each month for two years we spent three weeks with a chef and one week at school.”
How did you end up working for the Pourcel brothers? “When I was 19 years old, I got fired after arguing with the chef. It’s the only time I was fired. I came home and was laughing about it and my mum said, ‘You think it’s funny? You have no job. You think you can stay at home without a job for a long time? You can forget about it, it’s not going to happen.’
“I saw she was mad so I went back to my room and looked through the Relais & Châteaux and Michelin books. I remembered going on a summer holiday to the south of France and looking up restaurants there. I saw Montpellier had three Michelin stars for Le Jardin des Sens, run by chefs Jacques and Laurent Pourcel. I called and asked if they were looking for a commis chef. It was a Friday and they told me to start on Monday. I lived 800km from Montpellier. When my mum came home, I told her I would drive to Montpellier to start on Monday.”