Constance Festival Culinary 2023

4/17/23, 2:59 PM

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

Maurice (another of the group’s hotels on the island). Ramasawmy is from a prosperous family that could aford to send her to France to study at a private college but her only experience of wine when she was growing up was the St-Émilions that family members in France regularly sent over. She graduated with a BA in hospitality management at the Institut Paul Bocuse in Lyons, followed by a Masters, plus a Cordon Bleu wine diploma in Paris in 2017/18. Julie did a stage at Le Crocodile restaurant in Alsace in 2006 and in 2008 Constance paid for him to study wine for six months at Suze La Rousse wine university in south-eastern France. He won the Best Sommelier of Mauritius in 2012 and went on to represent the island at the ASI’s World’s Best Sommelier contest in Mendoza in 2016 – the frst Mauritian to do so. ‘Jérôme trusted me’, Julie told me, ‘and gave me his passion. He likes people. He likes the transmission of knowledge. He likes to help young people and he is humble.’ Ramasawmy’s journey to her current post couldn’t have been more diferent yet Faure was the key. In France her teachers had discouraged her from la sommellerie but she was not deterred. On her return to Mauritius in 2018 she was told that if she wanted to be a sommelier, she should meet him. She did and waited until an internship came up at Belle Mare Plage in 2019, and by 2022 had won Best Sommelier of Mauritius. (It is not a male only club: De Lores Malin was the winner in 2019 when Ramasawmy was runner-up.) Training is a key part of ‘transmission’, one of the words I heard again and again during the Constance culinary festival, the core of which is the teaming up of six Michelin-starred chefs from Europe with six local chefs to compete for the Bernard Loiseau trophy: an exchange of techniques, experience and local-ingredient knowledge. (Seeing the incoming chefs inspecting and snifng the unfamiliar greens, fruits, herbs and spices the home-grown chefs picked out for them at the local market in Flacq was a treat in itself.) Faure wants to set up a sommelier school on the island but it is the one project he hasn’t yet had time for. (Sarah Faure told me, ‘He is always in demand and can’t say no.’) It’s getting harder to recruit young people to work in hospitality, as in every other part of the world, and only about 15 % of those who start as commis sommeliers stay on. There’s a defned career path but it involves unsociable hours and while there appears to be a supportive working environment, the pay is no better than in most other trainee hospitality jobs and the cost of living on the island is rising. Once they are no longer novices, some sommeliers are lured away by other hotels – you’ll fnd Constance alumnae all over the island – or by the promise of higher salary and travel from the cruise ships. Beyond tourism and

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

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