The CTO turned kitchen assistant. Report from Cité Fertile, Pantin

Joseph Dureau, an engineer with degrees from Centrale and the LSE, has been CTO* of some famous companies. He is now a kitchen assistant and a graduate of La Source. Here's his life story and an interview at the Cité Fertile in Pantin.

Changing lives.
Numerous television programmes and magazine reports have made this one of their catchphrases: they've left everything behind, they've changed their lives, and so on and so forth. This is usually followed by a report on a couple who have left for the islands to set up a restaurant or a diving club, or the adventure of an ex-executive of a major group who has fallen in love with the Perche or the Creuse, where he (they) have renovated a building that has become a guest house. Since Covid, this scenario has been enriched by numerous variations.

Pantin is home to the aptly named Cité Fertile. The town, which is very close to Paris, is home to major advertising agencies, luxury brands, the metro and a host of successful initiatives. The Cité Fertile is one of them, as is an original cookery school, La Source, which has proved very popular with the students who have attended it. The customer reviews bear witness to this.

At the accompanying training restaurant, we were served in part by Joseph, a concentrated, discreet man whose age and face had led us to expect an original career path.

We were allowed to talk to him and take his photo, which was not the case for all the people in the restaurant. That's how it is with successful concepts, when the imperatives of communication take over.

Who are you Joseph and how did you come to be at The Source?
‘For a long time I was CTO of a well-known tech company in its day, Snips, which was then bought by Sonos. I was involved in the sale and integration of Sonos for the next five years, which required a lot of work and energy. 

I then wanted to take a break and think about another profession, one that would still have a creative or inventive dimension. In tech, when you develop software for the general public, this creative dimension exists, but I wanted to see something else. Cooking and pastry-making appealed to me and seemed to have this creative and technical dimension. I'm not at all disappointed: preparing a meal, cooking with healthy food, fermented here, and then serving it to customers, is a very stimulating exercise. You need technique and inventiveness, and you have to put them to good use in the service of creativity and pleasure, with great attention to detail. If you add to that the fact that here you think about what you're putting on the plate, how and where the food was produced and harvested, you discover a form of real depth. That's what I wanted.

Could the discovery of this profession and the content and form of this training have disappointed you?
What I wanted to do when I left my job as CTO was to take a step aside and broaden the scope of my professional career. I was attracted to cooking, but it's such a different profession that I knew I couldn't know exactly where I was going, that there was an element of leaping into the unknown. I was ready to be surprised, and I was. Cooking brings out strings and emotions in me that I wasn't really aware of. The people you work with are an important, essential dimension. Here, the chefs and the management team are caring and concerned, and use appropriate teaching methods. One of the school's priorities is to renew the culture in the kitchen, to put respect and inclusion at the heart of the teaching, going against the grain of the harshness often encountered in the kitchen. What's more, the importance given to eco-responsibility and fermentation (we're talking about ‘living cuisine’ here) are extremely fertile directions. Cooking an entire fruit, vegetable, fish or meat, and potentially fermenting it, raises questions, and requires an understanding of the fundamental principles of cooking and preservation.

The other students on the course with me have a rich and varied background. We're all retraining, there are former photographers, journalists, people who used to work in the social sciences, marketing or TV production. The atmosphere is studious, but everyone is involved, because a career change requires strong determination and represents a major investment, from every point of view, including financial.

What do you talk about with them during the breaks?
In the end, our past experiences play very little part in our discussions. What connects us is cooking. Some of us have been dreaming of becoming chefs since we were very young, and now we're taking the plunge. So we talk about cooking from all angles. The dishes we like, the ideas we try, the restaurants we discover. The equipment, too, or how we're re-equipping our home with more professional kitchen equipment. And finally, our career paths: how we look for and then find restaurants in which to do our first training courses, our first steps into the professional world of cooking.

What profession is the course preparing you for? A cook's diploma, a waiter's diploma or a pastry chef's diploma. In what capacity?
For the moment, the Source is training exclusively for the profession of chef. From September 2025, a new pastry-making course will be launched. The course I'm on is preparing students for a level 3 diploma, equivalent to the CAP cuisine, but without being restricted to the strict syllabus of the CAP cuisine. It's this freedom that allows us to spend a significant amount of time studying fermentation, for example, or that allows the practical exam to be based on vegetarian recipes, unlike the traditional CAP. We leave the course ready to work as kitchen assistants.

How much does this type of training cost and who paid for it? Your DIF, your ex-company, hoping to see you again later?
It costs just over 8,000 euros. I financed it partly with my Professional Training Account (CPF), and partly with my own resources. How you use your CPF is a personal choice, over which your previous employers have no control. There are other ways of financing this training: for example, the region finances part of it for some of my colleagues through the Transition Pro scheme, which helps employees with their career changes and transitions. It is also possible to do the Source training as an apprenticeship, in which case a restaurant pays for the training, and the pace of the training is different. The apprentice then alternates one week of training with three weeks in the company, for one year.

You often earn a very good living in tech, when you're a CTO and in well-funded companies like Sonos. Do you ever think about the fact that if you become a chef or restaurant owner, the level of remuneration will probably not be the same?
Yes. Retraining represents a major financial investment, because you have to be able to pay for the training, you have to manage the potential lack of income during the training, and then an income at minimum wage for the first few years. It's not just a financial investment, but also one in terms of time and social life, because working hours in the kitchen are often different from those in most jobs. I'm very aware of this, as are the other learners around me. This will be a determining factor in the sustainability of our retraining. It's an important factor for us, as it is for all restaurant professionals, and we're seeing more and more establishments adopting working hours that are more compatible with their employees‘ family lives, by closing at weekends for example’. 

4pm, off to school
At 4pm, Joseph has gone to pick up his children from school, which is not far away, because he lives in Pantin. Unity of place, time and action, just like in classical theatre. Joseph, an ex-engineer who has passed through the grandes écoles (Centrale, LSE) is clearly a man who thinks, questions himself, the world around him and the times. So we asked him to answer three more questions. Executives and entrepreneurs who have been at the heart of the reactor often don't have time to answer pointless questions or are not allowed to talk to the media. But now Joseph is free.

Extra-ball
Two recent books take an interesting look at the world of tech and the education sector. The first, Le Cube, révélations sur les dérives de l'enseignement (The Cube, revelations about the abuses of education), looks at some of the abuses of the funds that have invaded the sector and the example of Galileo Global Education. The second, Careless People, is written by a former Facebook employee. With hindsight, and given your background, is tech changing the world for the better, since we sometimes talk about tech for good? 
‘If by tech we mean software, the web, electronic objects, then these are just tools, very powerful tools. These tools can be used to change the world for the better, as you say, but if the expression tech for good exists, it's because not all uses of tech are good. They can also be futile or harmful. Sometimes, the general interest and the financial interest align. This is what has enabled players like Google and others to make knowledge accessible with just a few clicks, yesterday through search engines, tomorrow by exchanging information with Artificial Intelligence. 

Sometimes, the State relies on technology to better fulfil its missions, and we can see, for example, that administrative formalities have been drastically simplified thanks to digital technology. Software is unique in that it is expensive to develop, but freely reproducible: all you have to do is replicate the code on all the machines you want it to run on, and this replication is virtually free. This property gives software an immense potential impact: some software is used by billions of people. However, until robotics makes progress, software is locked behind screens and cannot act directly on the real world, which limits its ability to respond to our fundamental problems: feeding ourselves, keeping warm, escaping loneliness. There are also many aspects of our lives where the machine, however intelligent, will not replace the human being. Yes, technology can help change the world for the better, but technology will only be able to solve some of the problems we face, which is another reason why I'm interested in changing our horizons a little.

Should training remain a sector outside the financial market?
Or is it? Private education already accounts for a significant proportion of primary, secondary and higher education provision. The most important thing is that public education provision should be accessible to all, of high quality and across the board in all core subjects and curricula. From there, if the private sector finds a market to further diversify the offer, why not? This is what enables initiatives like La Source, for example, to be built on a private, paying (and subsidised) model, which will perhaps help to move public cookery training towards greater benevolence and eco-responsibility. However, if a private education market flourishes on the fringes of public education, then this is a wake-up call for investing time and money in public education. I don't think that banning private education is a solution, but it does seem to me that public money should be used primarily to support public education provision.

What can you tell us about food fermentation and its virtues, without re-reading your notes?
On the one hand, fermentation is nothing new; it plays a central role in the current or historic preparation of foods such as butter, yoghurt, cheese, wine, beer, sausages, soft drinks, etc. For the cook, fermentation has the virtue of cooking over a long period of time.

For the cook, fermentation has the virtue of being a long-term process. Lacto-fermented vegetables, vinegars and misos, for example, can be kept for months. So there's no need to be in a hurry: by getting organised, the fermenting cook can end up with a large number of preparations on his shelves, providing him with original and tasty ingredients, with a particular emphasis on umami flavour.

For the consumer, on the one hand, fermentation has the virtue of extending the range of tastes and offering surprising sensations, which is already a great deal, and on the other hand it boosts the nutritional content of dishes, particularly in terms of probiotics and vitamins’.

We had a great time at La Source, enjoying a balanced, fermented meal, one of the specialities of the chef who works there, Vanessa Lépinard. As one former student put it, it's a great school, a benchmark.

Interview and photos: Manuel Jacquinet, Edouard Jacquinet. 

To go further

Sonos, unhappy with Amazon's business practices, has stopped selling on Jeff Bezos' website from 2021.

Conversion in seventeen stitches. A talented former Darty demonstrator, who also worked at Le Bon Marché, has become a butcher. Here he explains.

‘The Anne Weber who moved us so much in Diabolo Menthe has become a head receptionist in Trouville.

In Praise of the Carburettor by Matthew B. Crawford, published in 2009, and a number of other books.

*Chief Technology Officer.