Lisa Maïssa

Lisa comes from a Corsican and Mediterranean family where cooking was a constant: her grandmother, her father. She still remembers the smell of octopus cooking from eight in the morning, on holiday mornings at her grandmother’s. Once she became a mother herself, she wanted to pass on the same thing to her daughter: things that were simple and true, close to nature, built on seasonal produce, short supply chains, and the fine ingredients of the Luberon.

She was twenty when she answered a job listing for La Closerie, in Ansouis, a one-star fine-dining restaurant that wasn’t actually hiring for the kitchen. Asked what she was there for, she answered with the confidence of her age: "I’m here to take your place." She started the next day, as a commis. The experience was extraordinary, but short-lived — balancing a young mother’s life with a gastronomic kitchen proved too hard. She retrained in graphic design, then spent twelve years as a tattoo artist — self-taught, faithful to pen and Indian ink rather than the fastest equipment on the market, always choosing quality over quantity. One rule never left her: do things with heart, or don’t do them at all.

Cooking, though, never really left her — and it slowly took over again. Lisa moved to Switzerland, where she landed a season at a farmhouse restaurant near Neuchâtel. She started there as a commis; within the first month, a food critic noticed her cooking, and her employer promoted her to cook and extended her contract by a year. She has now returned to the region she calls home, the Luberon, to become a chef in her own right.