Chef Talk: William Mahi

William Mahi is the Chef de Cuisine at Lan Club, where he presides over Papillon, the most lepidopterist-friendly restaurant in Shanghai. He told TALK about his prodigious beginnings, bombs in Beirut and the worst insult a chef in China can get.

William Mahi’s cooking career really began when he was kicked out of hospitality school in his home town of Biarritz, in Southwest France. “Unfortunately I didn’t like it. Most of the time I slept, and when I woke up, I enjoyed time with my comrades in the classroom.”

He decided he wanted to be a chef’s apprentice and at age 14 he began working in a five star restaurant, and studying for a one year diploma in Bayonne. On completing the qualification, his teacher sent him to a one Michelin star restaurant in his home town, Table des Fréres Ibarboure, to work as an apprentice. “I think he found me a bit different, with a bit more juice, more energy. And you know in Michelin star restaurants you must have energy.”

Just two years later he was named the Best Apprentice in France. One month before the competition, apprentices were given a list of ingredients and told to prepare dishes that expressed themselves. “My boss wasn’t there,” he recalls. “I was alone in Paris. The first time I went there.”

Mahi grabs his own leg as he describes the stuffed chicken leg he prepared for the competition. Things didn’t go exactly to plan. “We had one oven for 20 boys, with different types of cooking,” Mahi says, and he didn’t think he could use the steam technique he had planned. Ruffled, he asked the judge, three Michelin star chef Claude Delyne – who Mahi considers the best chef in France at that time – how he could possibly do it. Delyne suggested cooking the chicken in the stock, and though he had never tried the method before, Mahi pulled it off.

Regarding the competition, Mahi says, “I’m proud, but that’s not something I talk about often. That kind of thing is a kind of personal satisfaction.” Yet, he says, “that prize gave me an open door to open a restaurant anywhere.”
Mahi worked in Michelin-starred restaurants around France for almost nine years, before taking a job as the Executive Chef at the InterContinental, Beirut. “My first night, at seven o’clock I woke up with a huge car bomb, maybe one or two kilometres away.”

The hostile environment was an unwelcome reminder of attacks by separatists in the Basque area where he grew up. “In my home town there are many attacks. This one part, Pays Basque [which extends into France and Spain] wants to separate. In Spain they kill. In France they target government buildings, McDonald's – but they are smart, they call first.” In Beirut, bombers don’t always give advance notice.