Top French chefs warm to AI in the kitchen

At the annual gathering of France's finest chefs for the Michelin Guide awards this year, the talk was not only about whose restaurants had gained or lost a star.

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"Everyone's discussing AI. I was at a table of 12 other chefs and it was the main thing we talked about," said Matan Zaken, who runs the one-star Nhome restaurant in Paris.

The 32-year-old believes that some of his peers are reluctant to admit just how much they are already consulting services such as ChatGPT to help them with recipes and ideas.

"You'd be amazed to know how many people are using it. There are a lot of egos in the business. They're not going to make a big thing about it," he said.

Zaken has made a point of openly embracing the technology, which he says has the potential to produce surprising new pairings of ingredients, offering the possibility of palate-twisting discoveries for diners.

"You have to move with the times," said the Franco-Israeli owner of the intimate 20-cover Nhome, where guests eat around a large communal table.

Instead of relying on his usual kitchen tasting books, he can now access vast online databases of food photographs, recipes and even the chemical analysis of food molecules.

One recent discovery thanks to ChatGPT Premium, which he says is starting to learn his cooking style, was the complementarity between peanuts and wild garlic.