From “Top Chef” To Barcelona Fusion
Yoake San is a French/Japanese chef. From her Top Chef debut to her newest project, she talks to us about her passion for food.
“I’ve always loved to cook. My mother is Japanese, and when she moved to France, she always kept her culinary identity alive. I grew up with this mix.” explains Yoake.
Cooking as a way of life
For her, cooking was a sort of therapy, a way to bring life to her emotions. Yoake was a pretty introvert person, and she soon realized that she brought her feelings forward through cooking.
“I love sharing. I understood early on that if I loved cooking it was because I loved bringing people together. Sharing a meal is an incredible way to bring all kinds of different people together and put everybody in an agreement. We do this since the dawn of time, and it’s really important to me”.
She started studying law, but the second year in, she could tell that it wasn’t a good fit. “I realized that what I really wanted was to cook. So I joined the Vatel Institut instead, and that’s when my career as a chef really started”.
“Sharing a meal is an incredible way to bring all kinds of different people together and put everybody in an agreement”
Traveling through food
She had a rather atypical journey. After the Institut, she started to do things on her own, but soon enough, people started to notice. “I was very lucky, I was taken under the wing of a variety of renowned chefs, I went from one kitchen to the other and learned so much”.
She then started to work as a private chef, working on culinary designs, doing after-shows for big houses.
After that, she entered the French TV Show “Top Chef” in 2010, and from then on, for 5 years, she did multiple TV shows. One of them, “Le Goût du Voyage” or the “Taste of Travel”, took her all around the world. “It was such an amazing experience for me. I’ve met so many amazing persons, from the little grandma to the Chef Etoilé, and I learned so much. I’ve particularly loved my trip to the interior of China. It was incredible to be received by people who had almost nothing but gave everything”.
She’s really thankful for all those shows that brought her so many places, but also for what they are doing to the culinary world: “When I started, fine cooking wasn’t a very democratic environment. Being a woman, I really had to prove myself and prove that I had a place in this world. 15 years ago, it was still such a male area. I think cooking shows really helped to balance the field and to restore a positive image”.
Plans for the future
She fought her way through and achieved so much already. But when asked about her biggest accomplishment, Yoake stays incredibly simple and true: “my daughters. They truly are my best recipes. And they love cooking as well! I cook pretty much all the time, so they got a real taste for it. My eldest even wants to become a “pâtissière”. She loves to cook, and she loves the sweet stuff”.
For the future, Yoake has big plans. First, she will very soon open her own restaurant in Barcelona. “I’ve been working on it for one year. It is a very atypic place, something like me. It’s French Japanese fusion. It is called Yubi. It’s the initials of my kids and husband, and it means “finger” in Japanese, I really looked for a name that meant something for me”. The restaurant opening date was pushed due to the pandemic but should open before the end of the year.
And after that? Who knows. “I think I would love to open my own agriturismo. Have my own vegetable garden, chickens, fresh eggs. Everything homemade”. But one step at the time.
