Édition n°01
Founding chefs
The chefs who lend their name to the inaugural edition. Only the first edition ever has founding chefs — the roll closes permanently after it.
Founded by Délidoor.
Christophe Grégoire
Christophe Grégoire was born in the Vosges, near the German border, to a family of cheesemakers. He trained in France and has taught chefs across Europe, the Pacific and the Americas. He met his wife Joséphine while working in New Caledonia, and together they opened Christophe’s in Manuka in 1999 and then Le Très Bon in Bungendore, running a hatted French kitchen in a country village for more than twenty years. They now lead gourmet tours and cooking classes in France, New Caledonia and Australia. During the Covid years he served as President of the Disciples d’Escoffier in Australia, where he proudly led three chapters of the Dîner d’Épicure. In 2024 the French Government made him a Chevalier de l’Ordre du Mérite Agricole.
Clément Chauvin
Born in Paris and raised in Lyon, Clément Chauvin started in kitchens at fifteen. He trained as a commis under Anne-Sophie Pic at her three-Michelin-starred restaurant, then at twenty-two took his résumé to the back door of Gordon Ramsay’s Claridge’s in London and began again at the bottom, working his way to chef de partie in six months. In Australia he took his first head chef role at Bistro Paris in Sydney before moving to Canberra, where he has been sole owner and executive chef of Les Bistronomes since 2019. In 2024 he bought Montrachet, Brisbane’s twenty-year-old French institution, out of administration and reopened it. His cookbook Bistronomie was published in 2025, the same year the French Government made him a Chevalier de l’Ordre du Mérite Agricole.
Gabriel Gaté
Born in the Loire Valley in 1955, Gabriel Gaté trained under master chef Albert Augereau at Jeanne de Laval, then cooked at Prunier in Paris, the Berkeley in London, and under Alain Senderens at the three-star L’Archestrate. He came to Australia in 1977 and has spent the half-century since teaching Australians to cook French food: more than twenty cookbooks, over a million copies sold, and fifteen seasons of Taste Le Tour on SBS, which fixed French regional cooking to a date in the calendar every July. In 2000 the French government made him a Chevalier de l’Ordre du Mérite Agricole.
Philippe Mouchel
Philippe Mouchel was born in Normandy, into a family where his father, mother and grandmother all cooked, and apprenticed at Le Grand Cerf in Évreux. In 1975, out of military service, he wrote to a chef he had met only briefly asking for work; the reply sent him to Lyon, and he spent the next twenty-five years with Paul Bocuse, opening and running his restaurants in Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Houston and Tokyo. Bocuse sent him to Melbourne in 1991 to open Restaurant Paul Bocuse at Daimaru, which in 1994 became the only restaurant in Australia awarded five hats. He stayed. Langton’s, Liberté in Sydney, The Brasserie at Crown and PM24 followed, each of them hatted, before he opened Philippe on Collins Street. He wrote More than French with Rita Erlich, with a foreword by Bocuse, and is President of Bocuse d’Or Australia.
Romain Bapst
Born in Strasbourg and trained in France, Romain Bapst arrived in Australia in 1990. He cooked at Mietta’s in Melbourne, on Hayman Island and at Prunier’s in Sydney, then spent thirteen years at Il Centro in Brisbane before opening Lutèce in Bardon in 2013, a bistro known for its duck press. He is President of the Académie Culinaire de France in Australia and of Les Toques Blanches Queensland, a past President and Chairman of Bocuse d’Or Australia, a Maître Rôtisseur of the Chaîne des Rôtisseurs, and the only Maître Canardier in the country. In 2017 the French government made him a Chevalier de l’Ordre du Mérite Agricole.
Sébastien Houillon
Sébastien Houillon is from the Bordeaux region. He began in London in 1997, joining Gordon Ramsay’s first two-Michelin-starred Aubergine, then worked at the brasserie group Chez Gérard and Regent’s College. He came to Australia in 2002, held positions across a number of restaurants and ran his own catering business before taking charge of Délidoor’s kitchen, where he creates and oversees recipe development, produce sourcing and the relationships with local suppliers. His work there is an argument about a category: frozen food in Australia has long been assumed industrial by default, and he set out to prove otherwise, cooking from scratch with the technique of a restaurant kitchen, without processed ingredients or added flavours, and building every sauce from scratch. Bœuf bourguignon became one of the kitchen’s signature dishes, and is the reason the day exists. In 2022 he collaborated with Indigenous chef Aunty Beryl Van-Oploo on a series of dishes built around native ingredients.