“I was born in Canada and raised in the US in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. My parents are English and emigrated there many years ago. I had also been obsessed with French literature and imagined myself living in Paris from my teens. After travelling around Egypt and Crete, I was working a summer job in Brighton, UK and saw a recruitment ad for Eurodisney (now Disneyland Paris) and was hired to work in their hotels.”

Once a foodie, always a foodie?

“I’ve always loved eating, but there wasn’t a lot of gastronomy where I grew up in North Western Pennsylvania. The town where my family lived had a population of 600 and restaurants were few and far between. I remember burgers and ice cream after playing baseball games, milk and cheese we got from local farmers, and summer BBQs with corn on the cob and melted butter. And raw hot dogs I snuck when no-one was looking.”

Is being a gourmet in Paris all it’s cracked up to be?

I think Paris has a great lifestyle in general, but it’s an expensive city and not always easy.

Although I speak French, living here is like being a perpetual tourist, I think that’s fun.

What comes first Paris or food? Or is it irrevocably linked?

“Paris came first because I was always enamoured with the culture and didn’t know much about food when I first came to live here. But now, food is inexorably linked to the city I now call home.”

How would you describe yourself and your life as a Parisian food guru?

“I’m just a curious and enthusiastic person who goes to the logical and creative end of my ideas. I’ve been lucky to be able to help people discover new places in my day job and in my writing and love to share my discoveries with people who appreciate them.”

How did the idea of ‘Inside Chefs’ Fridges’ come along?

“I’d been wanting to write a beautiful book on the chefs around Europe who fascinated me and had decided with my co-author, Carrie Solomon, to do it. We spent weeks curating a list of the most relevant and interesting chefs, but still didn’t have the idea that would tie them all together, although we knew it would be more of a home chef book with simple recipes and great photographs. The ‘aha’ moment came to me one morning when opening my fridge and wondering what chefs would have in theirs. We developed the idea together from then on, and started to contact culinary masters, all of whom thought the idea was really fun.”

What’s next?

“I’m waiting on word from a television show project, again with co-author Carrie Solomon. I’ve tentatively started a fiction book, but can’t say anything about that at the moment, but I think my writing future lies in not just focusing on food but other aspects of interesting, hidden and unknown subjects. But food will always have a top spot in my life.”

Inside Chefs’ Fridges features Joan Roca, Massimo Bottura, Fergus Henderson, Yotam Ottolenghi, Marco Pierre White, Hélène Darroze, Inaki Aizpitarte, Mauro Colagreco, Thierry Marx and Christian F. Puglisi, amongst others.

“If I hadn’t travelled and tried to follow my dreams while a teenager, sort of wandering around and figuring out what I wanted to do, I don’t think I would be writing books on food now.”