Maxime started out as a journalist. Then the first lockdown hit, and he ended up in a kitchen as a volunteer — and never really left. Self-taught, curious to a fault, and obsessed with the things that actually matter in a dish: seasoning and sauce, always precise, always with a personal twist.

He cut his teeth in Paris and Le Havre, earned a Fooding nod, and has spent the last year doing residencies across Europe, testing his cooking on new tables and new crowds. His food is French in its bones — bistro, direct, generous — but with flavour references that stretch from Beirut to Osaka to Mexico City.