Words by Linnea Zielinski
Photography by Rebecca Plotnick

“We need to be sitting together over a bottle of wine,” Jane Bertch says as she launches into what can only be described as a dizzying leap from a 10-year banking career to owning and running her own cooking school. Her friendly jocularity is a serendipitous illustration of the driving ethos of her school―for all the glitz a French cooking school implies, classes at La Cuisine Paris are less like a meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant and more like a split bottle of wine at a corner café. You can be sure that’s intentional.

Tasting the Difference

French cuisine has the reputation of being elegant, refined, intimidating, and, if honest, probably a little elitist―something best left to graduates of culinary school and celebrated domestic mavens. For the gutsy home chef with enough gall to tackle classic French dishes, the food industry can seem rife with untouchable professionals feeding them wisdom from on high (or from the pages of embossed cookbooks that are doomed to gather dust).

To Jane, culture―even beyond food―is a composition of community members sharing how their families did things. French cuisine, like any other, is something composed in family kitchens, making it an art without pretense. Upon this belief, La Cuisine Paris has flourished. Where other chefs would lecture, Jane has hired teachers who engage their students, imparting accounts of their childhood kitchens, spoons licked from family recipes.

It is on this level playing field (why, yes! Food should be fun!) that classes are conducted. Chef-instructors at La Cuisine Paris engage students in two, three, even five hours of cultural exchange from which everyone emerges with a sense of camaraderie, and smelling strongly of butter. It’s this sense of the food being their food, not the instructors’ food, that Jane believes makes all the difference in students’ experience and taste.

If you doubt whether the taste of a buttery croissant can change just because of environment, think about eating it at your cubicle before starting work in comparison to the company it might keep beside a cappuccino at a café on the Champs-Élysées.

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