There is a particular kind of chef who will not be talked into things. They have cooked long enough to have seen every trend arrive and leave, and they are unmoved by the arrival of another.
Six of them have put their names to the first edition of this day.
Gabriel Gaté was born in the Loire Valley and apprenticed under a master chef at Jeanne de Laval before working 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 nearly fifty years teaching Australians to cook French food — more than twenty cookbooks, over a million copies sold, and fifteen seasons of Taste Le Tour. In 2000 the French government made him a Chevalier de l’Ordre du Mérite Agricole.
Philippe Mouchel grew up in Normandy in a family where his father, mother and grandmother all cooked. In 1975, out of military service, he wrote to a chef he had met only briefly to ask for work. The reply sent him to Lyon, and to Paul Bocuse. He stayed twenty-five years, opening Bocuse’s restaurants in Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Houston and Tokyo, before Bocuse sent him to Melbourne in 1991. By 1994 his was the only restaurant in Australia awarded five hats. He is President of Bocuse d’Or Australia and cooks today at Philippe on Collins Street.
Clément Chauvin was born in Paris, raised in Lyon and in kitchens at fifteen. He trained as a commis under Anne-Sophie Pic at her three-starred restaurant, then joined Gordon Ramsay’s Claridge’s in London, where he began again at the bottom and worked his way back up. He owns Les Bistronomes in Canberra and, since 2024, Montrachet in Brisbane. Chevalier de l’Ordre du Mérite Agricole, 2025.
Christophe Grégoire comes from the Vosges, from a family of cheesemakers. With Joséphine he 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 across three continents. He is a past President of the Escoffier Association in Australia. Chevalier de l’Ordre du Mérite Agricole, 2024.
Romain Bapst trained in France and came to Australia in 1990, cooking at Mietta’s, on Hayman Island and at Prunier’s before thirteen years at Il Centro and then opening Lutèce in Brisbane in 2013. He is President of the Académie Culinaire de France in Australia, a past President of Bocuse d’Or Australia, a Maître Rôtisseur, and the only Maître Canardier in the country. Chevalier de l’Ordre du Mérite Agricole, 2017.
Sébastien Houillon is from the Bordeaux region and began in London in 1997 at Gordon Ramsay’s Michelin-starred Aubergine, then Chez Gérard and Regent’s College. He came to Australia in 2002 and runs the kitchen at Délidoor, where he cooks everything from scratch.
What they have in common
Five of the six hold the Chevalier de l’Ordre du Mérite Agricole, the French state decoration for services to agriculture and gastronomy. It is not a prize for cooking well. It is given for what a person has done to carry the culture, which is a different thing and a rarer one.
Two of them, Chauvin and Houillon, came up through Gordon Ramsay kitchens in London twenty-five years apart and did not know it until this month.
Three of them — Mouchel, Bapst and Grégoire — hold or have held the presidency of a French culinary institution in Australia. Between Bocuse d’Or, the Académie Culinaire de France and the Escoffier Association, they represent most of the formal French culinary establishment in this country.
None of them needed this day.
That is rather the point. A first edition has nothing to offer except the argument, and the argument is simply that bœuf bourguignon is leaving menus for the worst possible reason — not because it stopped being good, but because there is nothing new to say about it.
Six people who have spent a combined two hundred years in kitchens think that is a poor reason to lose a dish.
Founding chefs are named once. Only Édition n°01 will ever have them.