While he has just experienced one of the biggest evenings of the year with the famous Gala of the New York Metropolitan held on Monday, an event probably the most worldly on the planet, we expected to exchange with an overwhelmed man, overwhelmed by the frenzy of the city who never sleeps. What Nenni! Jean-Marc Houmard, taking advantage with his dog a day of respite in his holiday home bordered by the Atlantic in the suburbs of New York, lends himself with great pleasure to the exercise of maintenance with the “modest” daily of his original land.
Gone for a semester
This sexagenarian, son of Marc-André, is however at the head of an institution frequented by the most famous artists of this world: Indochina, restaurant of Vietnamese cuisine located in the very chic and upscale NOHO district (North of Houston Street) in Manhattan. Nothing was written in the course which led Jean-Marc Houmard from the Tavannes valley to the capital of the world.
In 1985, when he had just acquired his lawyer’s certificate, the man won an unpaid six-month internship in a New York office. To support his needs, he pushes the door of Indochina and was engaged as a server despite his inexperience. “I liked both in the city and in this restaurant. I never stopped pushing back my return to Switzerland and I am still here, forty years later. I had at the time a workstation that awaited me in the CICR in Geneva,” smiles the one who will never have pleaded.
