“I love to eat”, she begins by telling us. This young 25 year old Taiwanese, a polyglot if ever there was one - she speaks Mandarin, Taiwanese, French and English!- comes from Nantou. For her, cooking is above all, associated with her parents who manage a traditional style restaurant. After 3 years of high school, she learned French at the university and chose as her major Hospitality. It was after this, through a friend and on the internet that she discovered the Institut. Especially prudent, she asked her sister who was living in France, to investigate for her. A friend of her sister who is an alumnus of the school contacted her immediately to tell her about her own experience at the school. Yen-Chi reassured, the classes could start…
Yen-Chi, don’t forget, likes to do things correctly and needs to excel. In spite of the fact that she spoke French well enough, she decided to take two years of French in Lyon… However, at the Institut she was up against “the difficulties of learning her lessons”- obviously there were going to be language barriers! - but community life at the Clipper and help among the Taiwanese students helped her to eradicate these inconveniences. The real difficulties, she encountered during her internship in Lyon with Chef Jean-Claude Pecquet: “physically, it is difficult being a woman in the kitchen. You have to lift heavy pots and pans; there are a lot of manipulations and you need a lot of energy!” she almost apologizes… It is difficult but she hangs in there. Four and a half months with only three in the kitchen during the high season, she is very determined and tenacious. Can’t wait to see what she does for the second internship. 

The second internship hadn’t yet started when we met for this interview. Yen-Chi is only in her second year and the end of the year finals are barely over! Just like a world traveler, she only told her destination: the restaurant La Pinède in Saint Tropez… So excited, she adds that “it will be a big first for me to observe a hotel with an integrated restaurant”. Even if it is a little early to speak about her projects, she explained that she would like “one day to be able to offer my Taiwanese compatriots the possibility of choosing between French cooking and their own”. Here she smiles, but just briefly, just the time to compose herself in order to tell us that “The Institut Paul Bocuse gives us one of the most solid bases possible, but after that it is a matter of expressing oneself through cooking...”