FOOD CULTURE. Chef of the week: Arnaud Jean freewheeling after making us eat the world

Born in 1968, the year of the barricades, in Toulouse, Arnaud Jean made his parents of peasant origin proud by pursuing a classical education. Middle school, high school, he obtained his accounting baccalaureate and continued with a BTS then prepared for the chartered accountant diploma. He is passionate about horse riding and cooking (a passion that came from a mother spending her life in the kitchen), but accounting “is better”.

“You don’t make horse riding a profession. And branching off into cap cuisine at the end of third grade was seen as a failure by most parents, he explains. Even if accounting has served me all my life, I don’t could not envisage making it my career. After my studies, I went to do my military service in Fontainebleau in horse riding.

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This will be his job for almost 10 years. He even had his own stable on the family farm after competing in the French championships, without ever winning a title. “It also comes down to horses and a good horse was too expensive for me.” Arnaud will turn his passions into his professions, so he moves on to the second, automobiles. He worked in garages for around ten years before the third arrived, cooking…

The kitchen turning point

By cooking at home and in agreement with Marie Eve, his wife, Arnaud decides to stop driving and signs up with a temp agency to find a job in the kitchen, inventing cooking missions for himself. ‘stranger. So he starts in Balma in a nice brigade. This turns out to be rather complicated at first. After four months, the boss offered him a job which he refused and he continued to learn in the restaurant Chez Yannick, located in the Saint-Aubin district of Toulouse.

In 2015, there was a big upheaval, he launched into the food-truck adventure by setting up The Trook. A few years later, motivated by the success of his food truck, he found premises in the Launaguet commercial area and set up Mange Monde, which he did the work himself and where he distilled his cuisine with its touch of elsewhere, fruit of his many travels.

The restaurant is very successful, the chef is hyperactive, constantly changes these dishes, participates in the French burger championships and ends up selling it in the spring of this year to settle down a bit and change the way he works. Since then, he has run the kitchen at Bàcaro, mainly at lunchtime now. He also provides home chef and other services. Will we see him again at the head of his own restaurant? “It’s not impossible…”