La Pâtisserie Cyril Lignac, in the 11th arrondisement of Paris, is one of the city’s best bakeries. Its croissants are mindblowing. We’re talking flaky, buttery, melting deliciousness, made fresh to order every day – exactly the treat you’d hope to find in the French capital.
It’s where I’m due to meet YouTuber Alexis Aïnouz this morning. Alex for short. Or French Guy Cooking, if you go by the name of the channel where he shows eager home cooks – like himself – how to make classic French dishes to restaurant standard. He arrives on his bike, dressed down in jeans and a hoodie, with an ear-to-ear grin that I soon realise is permanent.
We order a few of the famous croissants and, while they bake, drink coffee at the café across the street. Alex begins to relate his story in English, with the thick French accent that he’s known for among his mostly Anglophone viewers but that nevertheless vexes a few rare French râleurs (grouches).
“The râleurs say that my accent sucks,” he says, laughing. “That I should just go to culinary school. That everything sucks. I think that everything sucks in their life, so I’m part of that.”
Ingredients ready for an eggy masterclass / Image: Antoine Doyen
Why should anyone care that Alex is attempting to recreate the perfect ratatouille, onion soup or, even, croissant at home? The answer has to do with a certain stuffiness around food that has made French cuisine seem inaccessible to many. For decades, Paris’s kitchens have been governed by a hierarchical system of brigades and a faithfulness to tradition that also made them resistant to change.
Thankfully, however, the city is currently in the middle of a culinary revolution. Artisanal coffee roasters are taking the place of ho-hum cafés, and smart neo-bistros with no-frills dining rooms are appearing on street corners, inside of which innovative chefs serve dishes designed to share, featuring just a handful of fresh ingredients and loads of international influences.
Connected to all this is Alex, who’s amassed over 1.6m followers on his YouTube channel in seven years of cooking, and is putting a smiling face to the idea that food doesn’t need to be pretentious to be superbly tasty.
“My content is quite casual. It’s fun in the approach,” he explains. “But, in fact, my missions are very serious. One of them being: I really want to get the ‘posh’ out of French cuisine.”
Alex's self-built studio is as much a workshop as a kitchen / Image: Antoine Doyen
It’s no coincidence that the cover image of his book, Just a French Guy Cooking, is this ‘French guy’ eating Japanese ramen. Which isn’t to say that Alex doesn’t love the French classics – pot au feu is one of his personal favourites. It’s the stuffiness he wants to do away with.
“Those dishes are about nothing other than love,” he says, passionately. “The only thing that is important is that I cooked for six hours straight, just because I love you.”
He’s talking, here, about his wife, who is both the object of his affections and the guinea pig for many of his efforts in the kitchen. “It might be fun from the outside,” he continues, “but from the inside, I think it’s a bit disturbing. Sometimes, my wife is literally eating the same dish for a week.”
This obsessive “madness”, as Alex terms it, is evident when we arrive at his studio just around the corner – the place where he films all his videos. To me, it looks more like a DIY workshop than a pro kitchen and for good reason. Alex is a former engineer and everything in here he built himself. He proudly produces a whisk attached to a chopstick that fits perfectly into his power drill – at once useful and entertaining. He even recently attempted to use an electric kettle to recreate the recipe we’re making today – his ‘You’ve been doing it all wrong scrambled eggs’ – now produced in a makeshift double-boiler of a Pyrex bowl placed over a saucepan.
