CHEFS EXECUTIVE

Two French brothers have rejuvenated their nation’s love of cooking, and now they’re exporting it overseas.

WITH ITS RICH GASTRONOMIC HERITAGE and superlative restaurant scene, France has enjoyed its status as arguably the world’s premier culinary nation. But in recent years French society has adopted a more Anglo Saxon work culture, leading many commentators to lament that the Gallic passion for food is slipping away.

“We noticed that in France, where we are supposed to have this reputation as food lovers, people aged between 25 and 40 didn’t really know anything about cooking,” says entrepreneur Nicolas Bergerault. “Their mothers started to go to work in the ‘70s, at a time when frozen foods were developed and pizza delivery started. People had become less and less interested in cooking.”

It was this realisation that planted the seed of a business idea in the minds of Nicolas and his brother François. Forty-one-year-old amateur cook Nicolas had wanted to work in the food industry since he was a teenager, and now he saw the potential for opening a cookery school in Paris with François, eight years his junior. Their aim: nothing less than to re-engage the French with their cultural heritage and love of cooking food.

“We said: ‘We need to invent a new generation cooking class’,” says François, explaining that French cookery classes tended to be expensive, formal and time-consuming affairs. “The keyword for us was accessibility. It needed to be accessible so that people didn’t feel intimidated by it.”

The brothers opened their first l’Atelier des Chefs in Paris’ bustling 8th arrondissement business district on 12 July 2004. They offered classes that, at their shortest and least expensive, saw Parisians spending just half an hour and €15 (£12.50) to cook themselves a meal in their lunch break. Two months later and their simple idea of serving up approachable cookery classes suddenly took off.

“We started getting fantastic press coverage after a three-minute reportage [news] piece on French breakfast television,” says Nicolas. “Suddenly, all these people came and said: ‘I’ve seen you on TV, I’ve read about you in the newspaper, I’ve heard about you on the radio.’ They wanted to give it a try.”

In spite of “exceptional” business in Paris, they lay low for the first year, familiarising themselves with the fledgling company. But after that they “pushed the development button”, overseeing an expansion programme that makes for dizzying reading. Within four and a half years they had opened a total of 13 units, which included a mixture of stand-alone units in properties they own, concessions in department stores and a couple of franchises, following, they say, their original business plan to the letter.

“Turnover in 2004 was, over six months, €250,000 (£212,000),” says Nicolas. “Turnover in 2008 was €7m (£5.9m). Within the first five years we wanted to have 12 to 13 units and to reach an annual turnover of €7m (£5.9m) to €8m (£6.8m), so we are more or less aligned to our initial plan.”

Exporting the idea to foreign shores was also part of the plan, and their first sortie into a non-French market came with the establishment of l’Atelier des Chefs in Brussels. Chosen for its proximity to Paris – where their head office is still based – and the fact that half the population is French-speaking, Brussels was also attractive because the brothers were aware of a competitor there, suggesting the potential for business.

But London was the city that they coveted most keenly. L’Atelier des Chefs has a clientele that is typically half business-to-customer and half business-to-business, and with the UK capital’s vast business community it was “a no brainer” that they needed to set up shop there. Meanwhile, a certain celebrity chef had also opened their eyes to a new-found British enthusiasm for cooking.

“I was familiar with Jamie Oliver from Canadian television,” says Nicolas. “He is a fantastic chef, teaching real food to real people. He’s not like our high-end, three-star chefs in France, who were trying to convince people that it was easy when everyone knew that it wasn’t.”

They opened an outlet on Wigmore Street in London’s Soho last year, and despite admitting they “wished they hadn’t opened it in 2008” they plan to launch four to five more Ateliers in the city, plus another four to five outside London.

So, is this a crusade to spread the French love of food? “No, it’s a crusade to bring people back to the stove,” says François. “We have a French brand and that helps because the French are associated with food, but we are not French people who only want to preach about French food. We want our chefs to teach practical recipes drawn from world cuisine to the French, Belgian or British public.”

Unsurprisingly, their B2B clientele has suffered in most locations due to the global recession, but they claim that an increased level of B2C trade has compensated for this. “People have said: ‘I have less money to go out, and having a pizza delivered is costing me a fortune. So I want to learn how to cook great food.’”

Businesses that have over-expanded in recent years are currently facing the chop, but these young French businessmen are confident about their current position. “François and I always said that we want to ‘hurry slowly’,” says Nicolas. “We’ve always tried to find a balance between going too fast and going too slowly. We could have opened more and now be presiding over even greater profits, but we wanted to keep a proper control on the brand, the concept and the operation. We’re happy with how it has worked out.”

 

And their greatest triumph, they say, has been to devise “a timely solution to a non-communicated problem”. “People didn’t say: ‘We’re looking for an accessible cooking class,’” explains François. “They would say: ‘I don’t know how to cook and I don’t know where to learn.’ We came up with an answer they had not heard of.”

WORDS BY ALISTAIR DUNCAN

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