Constance Festival Culinary 2023

4/17/23, 2:59 PM

Jérôme Faure – the Indian Ocean's Mr Motivator | JancisRobinson.com

Julia Harding MW 17 Apr 2023 Jérôme Faure – the Indian Ocean's Mr Motivator

An inspiring encounter with an initially reluctant islander.

Jérôme Faure, who will be 49 in July, seems to have boundless energy and a remarkable capacity to enable and encourage those who work alongside him. As his wife Sarah told me, it’s not Faure’s prodigious knowledge of, and passion for, wine that makes him so successful and infuential – all around the Indian Ocean as well as at his base at the Constance Belle Mare Plage hotel on Mauritius – but his love of people. Jorald Julie, one of Faure’s two deputies, had told me pretty much the same thing the previous day, and I was to hear similar responses from all those I spoke to during the annual culinary festival organised on Mauritius by the Constance hotel group, orchestrated by Faure, in memory of French chef Bernard Loiseau. Frenchman Jérôme Faure was born in Isère in the Rhône Valley and began his studies at the Lesdiguières school of hospitality and tourism in Grenoble at the age of 14, completing his training as a chef, with an additional qualifcation as a sommelier, in 1996. Then followed travel to Ireland and Scotland, and coopération , the civil version of French military service, during which time he was chef to the governor of Les Invalides in Paris. Even though he had originally planned a career as a chef, wine won the battle for his heart and by the time he met Sarah at Le Mas des Herbes Blanches in the Luberon, after his frst job as a sommelier at La Mirande in Avignon, there was no going back to the stoves.

How did this French couple end up on an island in the Indian Ocean?

Sarah, who grew up travelling around the world thanks to her father’s employment in the armed forces and had always wanted to live and work abroad, trained at the hotel and tourism school in Montpellier. While working at Le Mas des Herbes Blanches, now married

https://www.jancisrobinson.com/articles/jerome-faure-indian-oceans-mr-motivator

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