Global epicure relishes Zhuhai

MICHEL Seyve, the Holiday Inn Zhuhai’s executive chef for half a year, says his experience traveling around the world and experiencing different cultures over the past few decades helps immensely in his work.
Michel, 48, has been working 30 years since graduating from culinary school in France in 1979. He has been to England, the United States, Mexico, Burma, Indonesia, Macao, Vietnam, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela and other countries and regions including Shenyang, Beijing and Guangzhou. He had worked at Garden Hotel in Guangzhou for almost three years.
Having traveled so much, seen so many different places and worked with so many different kinds of people, Michel thinks he is much more open than Chinese people, western people or anybody who just lives in their own country without having worked abroad, as he has different understanding of life and people in general.
What ignited his passion to travel the world? “I think I had a virus when I was a kid. I was about 13 years old and I caught the traveler’s virus,” he says. When his brother came back from a trip to Monaco, he shared with people photographs he had taken back and the unusual things he had bought in the markets there. “Looking at all those things and pictures, it gave me the idea that I wanted to travel,” he says.
The first offer of a job in England in 1979 opened up Michel’s global career and kept him at it for three decades. “I really enjoy the atmosphere of the kitchen, the heat, the stove, the smell and all that stuff,” he says.
Michel still remembers his most creative period as a chef. It was on Bora Bora, an island in the Leeward group of the Society Islands of French Polynesia where everything was imported via boat twice a week.
“I had to look at what was available locally and create recipes with the local products, also keeping in mind that these people coming to Bora Bora wanted to have a memorable experience because it’s very expensive to fly there, so they had to be very, very special,” he recalls.
At last Michel created some wonderful dishes like “Paella,” a Spanish rice dish with saffron, seafood, and chicken baked in a shallow pan. Japanese rice, wakami seaweed and coconut milk were cooked with seawater. “Wow, it’s great!” people tasted it and liked it very much, he says.
No matter whether it is Spanish, Japanese, French, Thai, Chinese or any cuisine, you get all these different ideas that you can mix and blend in different ways of cooking things, and then you can create dishes that are very interesting for people because you don’t stick to one kind of cuisine, but you’re blending different cuisines together, he points out.
“That’s why I enjoy traveling. It’s not only enriching my mind and my memory of all the places that I’ve been and know the people that I’ve met, but it’s also enriching my culinary experiences,” he explains.
Michel says he will never forget a wonderful experience when he drove from San Francisco to Guadalajara, a city in the middle of Mexico 2,500km away. Driving through Baja California, which is semi-desert, he had some really tough meat but very nice fried potatoes with it. Then on the coast, he had some seafood such as giant lobster, then some soup in another town. They were all restaurants with wooden tables, cheap plates and glasses and nothing fancy, very cheap, basic food and very low price, 50 cents or a dollar, but wonderful flavours. “The whole trip was a culinary experience for me, because I stopped to know the new places on the side of the road. I had the real, authentic farmer’s food -- the food that all the people eat.”
Michel’s real interest in travel concerned food and nature though. “Nature is where I recharge my batteries,” he asserts. Chefs work in a hotel for a long time. “For me, after some while, I need to spend a few days in the mountain or on the beach where there is nobody,” he says. When he traveled four months in South America, he was on his own.
“You don’t get bored, because you always meet people in the street or in a café. You create relationship,” he says. His travels have left him a lot of warm experiences with certain scenes and people, he notes.
It took him 13 years to become a chef after he graduated from culinary school. “It depends on who you work with, and it’s also you, as a person. If you can take the responsibility for a kitchen, with enough knowledge, obviously, you’re going to become a chef. But this you can only learn from people and their experience; you can not learn from school,” Michel explains.
Right now, Michel says he is having fun and enjoying what he is doing. “I’m happy here, because I’m breeding some nice things in the Italian Restaurant, and we’re going to change the buffet early next month,” he says. He is also happy that more people enjoy what he is preparing in the Italian Restaurant by saying: “Wow, this is great food!”
Having signed a one-year contract, Michel hopes he can stay in Zhuhai for more years. “Zhuhai is a fantastic city,” he says, noting it’s clean with pure air and trees and mountains everywhere. He has visited a local island not long ago and claims: “There are still a lot of things to explore. I want to go to the mountains and experience the hot springs and things like that.” He adds: “So there’s still a lot to do here.”

Michel Seyve sometimes personally does the cooking. Photo: Betty Lin