From the Archive: When Chefs Lie, or The Fake French Chef

In 2009, I wrote a story about a fake chef who was cheating customers out of a lot of money based on his fake work experience in Europe’s best kitchens.

I tracked down the kitchens he said he worked at and proved him to be a liar. When I confronted him with that evidence, he kicked me out of his restaurant.

Soon after, I began getting anonymous emails from someone claiming to be a lawyer. They suggested that if I published the piece, they would find a way to have me deported.

My employer at the time didn’t want the risk, and the story was never published.

While going through some old files the other day, I found the story and thought it would be fun to publish it now, fifteen years later.

I’ve taken out the sensitive details, like the chef’s name. He made a mistake years ago — he may still be making this mistake — but no need to name him now.

The rest remains more or less as I wrote it in 2009, with a few thoughts at the end.

— saintcavish

*

I came across Chef X in December 2008, intrigued by the Gansu-born cook’s private French restaurant on Nanchang Lu. The menu was 880 RMB, a fortune back then, which he justified by saying he worked in the best kitchens in Europe for eight years.

I was skeptical.

Twenty-nine years old, and already sous chef — the number two — at Michel Bras, one of the world's best restaurants? Positions at Alain Ducasse's Plaza Athenee and Paul Bocuse's restaurant in Lyon? And he started cooking at 20? The background was too stellar.
Going from cooking school graduate to sous-chef in a three Michelin star restaurant is like going from a degree in International Relations to a deputy ambassadorship, and then giving it up to be head of the neighborhood committee.
 
In January 2009, (a magazine) picked up on him. The January issue interviewed X, anointed him "The Michelin Man," and asked easy questions about his time in the kitchens of France and his involvement in the Expo.

He talked about his “role” at Michel Bras, his upcoming "head chef" position at the restaurant attached to the Institut Paul Bocuse, which was opening a Shanghai branch in the regional Rhone-Alpes Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo later that year, and waxed nostalgic about the pressures, and pleasures, of working with the best.

The magazine urged: "Book soon to try X’s private restaurant, as it may only be open for a few more months."
 
So I did.

But first I contacted the restaurant Michel Bras, the three Michelin star restaurant X would later claim to have spent two years at, as chef de partie and sous chef.

Regine Bories, the assistant to Michel and his son Sebastien Bras, replied: "Sébastien Bras and Régis Saint-Geniez (Chef) remember that X stayed about 15 days in the restaurant. He was just 'commis de cuisine.' Mr X did not give them satisfaction."
 
A commis de cuisine is a grunt, the lowest rung on the kitchen hierarchy, the guy who picks the leaves from 20 kilos of watercress, or peels the potatoes with a spoon.
 
I ate dinner at X’s restaurant. The decor was charming, a three-story lanehouse with summery yellow walls and a bathtub full of ice and bottles of Champagne. The food less so. The first dish to the table held butter, the pickled cucumbers used for congee, and olives. Black olives, sliced, with the pit punched out in a perfect circle — the kind Subway uses on sandwiches, and Pizza Hut on pizzas.
 
Dessert was a dacquoise, a cake of sorts, made from almonds and beaten egg whites. X's version was decorated with neon pink strawberry coulis, from a tube.
 
In between, X offered a mackerel, a seafood soup with crayfish, a poached salmon, and a single lamb chop. The mackerel was average — the same fish you find at a thousand Japanese restaurants — and the crayfish tails mushy. The salmon was simple, the lamb low-quality. It was not the food of a prodigy.
 
After dinner, X joined us to tell stories of his “two years” at Bras, his “two years” with Ducasse, and his “four months” at elBulli, arguably the world's best restaurant. The stories were echoed in the restaurant’s own brochure, and in a wall of pictures in the stairway:
 
X: the founder of (company name). He graduated from the world's top culinary institute, France Bocuse School of Art and Food. He has worked in three-star restaurants for eight years at the Restaurant Paul Bocuse, Restaurant Michel Bras and Restaurant Alain Ducasse. He has exquisite cooking skills and rich experience at the management of a restaurant.

I spent months communicating with these restaurants to verify this. In the end, this is what they said.
 
Marine Cossard, Media Relations Officer for Alain Ducasse Enterprise, checked into X's claim of roughly two years with Mr. Ducasse's Plaza Athenee as chef de partie. It was, it turns out, "a training period at the kitchen of the restaurant Alain Ducasse at Plaza Athenee from November 2007 to March 2008."
 
And of elBulli? From Marc Cuspinera, who worked with elBulli in many capacities since 1990, including head chef: "I must tell you that between 1998 and 2009, X has not worked at the restaurant elBulli."
 
I took all of these emails to Chef X in person and asked him about the discrepancies.

He suggested that all of the restaurants must have been mistaken and turned defensive: "It’s not that Chinese people can’t cook French cuisine well. Chinese people can. A lot of French chefs are not as good as Japanese and Chinese chefs in France. Not all Westerners can cook better Western food than Chinese or Japanese."

On this point, I happen to agree with him. But it’s a distraction. That’s not the issue.

He insisted he “worked in those places”.

“But you pulled out these three emails and claimed that I only worked 15 days for one of them and didn’t work at the other one at all. Frankly speaking, this is nonsense. This is certainly wrong because I did work for these three places. I couldn’t have been sleeping for all these years and doing nothing."

He suggested I call the chef at Plaza Athenee, who would sort it out. I explained that I had.

X offered to send an internship certificate from elBulli on the following Monday. Instead, I received an email from an anonymous email account in legal language, threatening my ability to stay in China. It was the last word from X and his associates.

The restaurant closed quickly after that. X lost his position with the Institut Paul Bocuse.

When I told the story to the French chefs around town at the time, they either laughed or got angry at X (or both), but they all recognized right away that his CV was too good to be true in 2009, before the wave of Chinese cooks training in Europe that would come much later.
 
X was clever. He exploited the gap between Shanghai's desire to appear sophisticated and its actual knowledge of fine-dining Western food.

He played France's reputation for expensive fine dining against his customers' unfamiliarity of the cuisine, and profited from the discrepancy. Wrapping up the whole package in privacy and exclusivity ensured a low-profile, and a small pool of people to leave starstruck.
 
A single table meant he was only telling four or six or eight people a night his inflated stories about his career and the level of food he was cooking, while serving them something quite different. The high price tag only added to that. He deliberately confused price with quality, while cutting corners on ingredients.

If he was charging as much for a tasting menu as the most expensive Western restaurants in Shanghai at the time (Jean-Georges was 878 RMB and Laris was 888 RMB), the thinking goes, then surely he's serving something equivalent.

But those menus included luxury ingredients like tiger prawns, black cod, poached foie gras and a cheese course, and are created by teams of professionals.

X was just a liar.

*

Follow-up, 2024:

Lying on a resume is common. But doing it to the extent that X did, and using his ludicrous claims to justify 700% markups on wine and poor cooking, made it something different.

In 2024, there are still a number of restaurants in Shanghai and across China serving western food that exploit the same knowledge gap that X recognized in 2009, and trying to confuse customers with high prices.   

But I have to hand it to X. In all my years in Shanghai, he was the boldest, the bravest and the biggest liar I’ve met. Coupled with his high prices, to a former chef like me that’s not just resume inflation — it’s almost a crime.

A few years after I wrote and buried this article, X applied for a job with a French chef I know well, who knew about this story. The chef passed me X’s real CV — he wouldn’t have dared to lie to a chef of this stature.

The reality, it turned out, was more in line with my assumption: a university degree in material sciences before graduating cooking school in 2007, then a few brief internships as commis here and there.

X may still be around in Shanghai.

A few years ago, I heard he was the head chef of a French place near the Bund. Perhaps he has turned into a very good French chef in the years since I wrote the first article. But I Googled him for this 2024 follow-up, and found him still selling those old lies to fancy magazines.

It would be fun to visit him again. No doubt, I’d be the last person he would expect to walk into his restaurant in 2024, the annoying “chef policeman” from his past.

But I gave Chef X 880 RMB once, and apart from that and a good story, that’s all he’ll ever get from me.