The story of a father, told by his son

The story of a father, told by his son

Bernard Loury cuisinier
He was born in Dijon into a working class family. The third of six children, his father and mother were factory workers. Even though it was a large family and times were hard (my father used to tell me how he had to get up early in the morning and go out to the fields to pick potatoes or onions before joining his friends at school), there was always bread on the table.

From a very early age, Bernard wanted to become a cook. His life was laid out for him and he had no worries about his future. This was all due to his maternal grandmother ANTOINETTE..
She arrived in France at the end of the First World War, to escape from poverty in Italy. During that long journey, she was often hungry. One day, she met a plump, well-fed cook and concluded that this was obviously the best job to choose if you wanted to have a permanently full stomach. She immediately decided that one of her descendants would be a cook.

The beginning of a long story, or how a passion was born
As he was the most food-loving member of the family, it was always Bernard who had the privilege of tasting the sauce of the famous "coq au vin". Antoinette knew exactly how to prepare Bernard for his career as a great chef, by teaching him to recognise and understand the true values given to us by Mother Nature. My father did not disappoint his grandmother as he took the path she had always wanted him to take.

"Practice makes perfect" as the saying goes and Bernard's apprenticeships were to provide him with the foundations for his career.
He began as an apprentice at the " Vieille Auberge " in Auvillars-sur-Saone, near Nuits Saint Georges. At the age of just fourteen, he left his own family to join that of the cooking community. Then he left his home region of Burgundy to take on Paris. He worked for Garin, who at that time, was one of the great Parisian chefs. In 1970, he had to trade in his chef's hat for a soldier's beret, but that did not prevent him from meeting GHISLAINE, a young girl from the South (a French family from Oran in Algeria), and falling in love with her. He came to Marseille where she lived with her parents, with the idea of taking her back to Burgundy with him. However, she convinced him to stay in the South where the climate is somewhat sunnier than in the land of snails.

Stéphane Loury