Vincent Deforce
Since March 2024, chef Vincent Deforce can boast that he has touched the stars. He was honoured to be awarded a famous star by the prestigious Michelin Guide, a just reward for the hours and hours of work that he and his team put in This distinction means he has entered a very select group of French Michelin-starred restaurants, with a cuisine that’s a fusion of Mauritius and Haute-Savoie.
Let’s take a look back at the exemplary career of Vincent Deforce, chef at Le Cin5 restaurant in La Clusaz, as we enjoy a biryani and a sweet potato tartiflette!
For Vincent, cooking was initially associated with having a great time and food at a restaurant run by his parents’ friend when he was a lad. He was captivated by the dishes served, the smells and the tastes, without thinking for a minute that this environment would become his life and his world in a few years’ time.
As he puts it himself, his career is “a bit like the Aravis mountains, there are ups and downs”. After starting off at a hotel management school, at the age of 18, he met an inspiring and passionate chef, with the honour of a Best Craftsman of France, who sparked his interest in taking up pastry-making, a sector that he spent eight wonderful years in. His career in pastry-making gave him a sense of rigour and precision, principles he was able to transfer when he took over the kitchens of Le Cin5 restaurant after Thomas Eudier left.
For 12 years now, he has been working for the PVG Group in La Clusaz and, more specifically, as head of Le Cin5 restaurant, the gourmet hotspot at the Au Cœur du Village hotel. He describes it as “a gastronomic release”, allowing him and his teams to create a fusion cuisine that is simply astonishing, blending inspiration from Mauritius, where his wife and muse comes from, and the flavours of Haute-Savoie, where he has lived for several years now.
The five senses according to Vincent
Taste
In summer in our region, you can collect quite a lot of things and dry them so that you can use them all year round without having to think about it. It’s complicated always having fresh produce, so we have to look for alternatives. For example, when tomatoes are in season, the team gathers as many as they can and then, all together, we make as much tomato sauce as possible so that it’s available in winter. And customers love it; in terms of taste, what the restaurant offers is something really different and we surprise them when we tell them that we made this sauce in summer.
To showcase the distinctive flavours of Mauritius and complement them with all you can find in Haute-Savoie, we have to hunt out lots of little products. For the spices, we pick them up in person from the island when we go and stay there, and then a specialist in Lyon washes and grinds them so that we can use them. This means we stay within a close, local radius of La Clusaz. The aim is not to cook exotic dishes, but to introduce customers to different flavours, to make the local pasta crozet that bit more exciting or make a tartiflette with products you wouldn’t normally expect. Like a little spice that gives things a bit of a kick, but doesn’t necessarily take over. So, we season food and use more distinctive ingredients, like sweet potato, to add an element of surprise.
SMELL
When we talk about taste, smell is the next logical consideration. If it’s great but bland, there’s no point. The olfactory aspect is what is important in a dish; when you discover the flavours, the smells that come out, it immediately makes you want to taste the dish and discover everything it has to offer. This is when we sometimes go for minute-smoking under a dome cloche, for example, because when it’s opened in front of customers, the smell takes hold of you straight away.
We don’t just work on the sense of smell in our dishes, it’s an experience that starts as soon as you climb the stairs to the restaurant; customers smell the candles, which we have made by a company in La Clusaz (keeping everything local here too), having worked on a special aroma using spices. Then, when you enter the restaurant, there’s a smell of fir trees and chalets, reminiscent of the mountains, and then, the experience continues when we give customers a warm fir-scented towel to wipe their hands. We try to put customers in a bubble with different smells and flavours which they will remember even after the evening is over.
HEARING
You might imagine that in the kitchen of a gourmet restaurant, it’s like it’s depicted in the movies, but that’s not the case here. It’s very quiet; you have to concentrate to make sure things run smoothly when you start making the dishes, so that customers aren’t left waiting for five hours at the table. Everything is completely under control; everyone knows what they have to do and we work as a team. Even the atmosphere in the restaurant is relaxed; all the dishes are explained to the customers and, even before the taste, smell or other senses, you can imagine the dish from the story we tell.
TOUCH
At Le Cin5, touch is also an experience in its own right, starting when the customer sets foot in the restaurant. We serve canapés and ask them to eat with their hands so they can feel different things. And with bread, also homemade, you have to be able to hear it crunch, which is also a feast for the ears as well as the nose with the delicious aroma of freshly baked bread. Also, the whole experience of touching the crockery, the furniture, the feel of the tablecloth, all these little things, these details, stay in the memory of customers.
Sight
Sight is represented at Le Cin5 in its decor and with flowers, and we try to add touches of Mauritius on this point too. For example, the cowhide rug is given a splash of colour to keep the chalet feel, but with our own personal touch.
The visual aspect is also evident in the presentation of the dish, and we can be different from others here in that, as we come from pastry-making, we try to make something beautiful in terms of how it looks, something incredibly meticulous, well presented and specialised, so that when the customer sees his plate, he says to himself “Wow, there’s really been a lot of work put into this”. All this is worked out in advance, as a team, and to introduce the whole team to the traditional dishes of Mauritius and help them put the dishes together so they look good, we start by tasting the dish, as on the island, in street food fashion and then we put our heads together and think about how we’re going to translate and turn it into a gourmet version.
There’s no pressure, it’s fun and we’re very proud to achieve a great result together.
As you will have gathered, Vincent Deforce is passionate about helping his teams and customers discover new flavours by offering original, innovative cuisine. It’s only a hop, skip and a jump from Mauritius to La Clusaz and we’re very proud to have in our midst a man who can boast of touching the stars!
