Birthday: 16 July 1974
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Born on the 16th July 1974, Sebastien Masi was brought up in Clermont-Ferrand, central France, by his father, an interior designer. Masi’s father’s speciality was design for restaurants and nightclubs and so Masi spent many hours eating in fine dining restaurants during his father’s contract negotiations.
Masi’s first role in a commercial kitchen began in a small country house – Jean Marc Vindrie, which had one of the biggest wine cellars in the country. The young 33-year-old chef was running the establishment in the old school style, as his father had before him. Here they worked on the old wood cooker making their own cured ham, fishing for lunch in the river and picking mushrooms, rhubarb and apples from his mother’s garden. Masi explains his first memory of the Irish Culture was when the chef returned from a sporting weekend in Ireland shooting woodcock.
During the second year of Masi’s apprenticeship he had the good fortune to work alongside a chef, who had come from The Ritz in Paris. He made Masi realize that cooking could be a real art with enormous possibilities.
Hungry to push further at the age of 17, he took his knives and went to Paris, where he started to work for the opening of Copthorne Hotel Roissy. Whilst in Paris he also had the opportunity to work on a casual basis in many other kitchens in the city, such as the Meridien Etoile, Hotel Intercontinental, St Claire outside catering with M. Guy Savoie (three-star Michelin) and M. Gerard Besson (two-star Michelin). A wonderful opportunity to see the differences in styles of cooking and organisation – from 30 covers to 800, and from traditional to modern cuisine.