The French chef who learnt his trade in the UK takes Paris food scene by storm

This chef is putting a modern twist on "bon appetit."
Using the freshest ingredients from the fish market across the street, Frenchie restaurant is leading the charge in a food revolution in Paris.
Chef Greg Marchand learned to cook in London with British chef, Jamie Oliver, and then moved to New York, Hong Kong and Spain before returning to Paris in 2009.
Soon after, he opened "Frenchie" in an un-chic Parisien street. It was the nickname Jamie Oliver gave him when he worked in his kitchen in London.
There's nothing fancy about the restaurant: it seats about 30 diners, plates are simple white, and menus come on clipboards.
The first meal Greg Marchand cooked for a crowd was veal in cream sauce - and the dozen or so orphans he shared a home with ate it up.
He was subbing for the orphanage cook, who took weekends off. An indifferent student, he enrolled in cooking school after his time in the orphanage ran out at age 17.
"I started cooking when I was sixteen. It was little by accident; I grown up in a child-house (orphanage) and every weekend the chef of the child-house (orphanage) was off, so we were all cooking."
"After (the child-house) I was pretty on my own... finishing school and starting to work, you know. I had to pay a rent and I left as soon as I finished cooking school, I left France. I wasn't tied much to France."
Marchand's love affair with food put him at the crest of bistronomie - the French movement combining highbrow gastronomy and the lowly corner bistro.
And from that, he got the food bug. "I really liked the way that people react to the good food," he says.
He learned a great deal from different chefs, and global palates.
"Jamie Oliver really liberated me, he liberated me in terms of cooking, he made me realise that one can make very simple and very tasty dishes. That helped me to get rid of blinkers I had from cooking school even if it is true that they teach us techniques that are sill very important in my cuisine of course," he says.
Centre of haute cuisine, Paris has been a relative latecomer to the idea of fresh food with local ingredients at prices more for the masses.
"A lot of young chefs, I'm part of it, opened restaurants with no investors, so with not much money, so it's often small places with no designer work, because we can't afford it, but what we have is a craft, is knowledge, is the experience in fine dining restaurants."
For 48 euros ($65), diners get a three-course meal at Frenchie.
It's not cheap, but neither is it especially expensive in a city where tourists expecting the world's finest cuisine instead routinely get fleeced in brasseries serving poor food at high prices.
Steve Farkas, a tourist from New York agrees: "Everything feels fresh and light and just made and it's actually easier to eat than french food I'm accustomed to."
Food blogger, Meg Zimbeck from Kansas says Marchand is changing the way people shop and experience food: "So, it's a very small amount of in gredients but purity of flavours, completely seasonal, very fresh that make you wake up and say: OK, this is something pretty special."
But for Marchand, the proof is in the eating.



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