The cartoon character adorning ads and menus for the Kyoto restaurant Le Table de Thierry, it turns out, is a pretty good approximation of the owner himself: an upbeat, grande-size French-Togolese chef with a passion for demystifying French cuisine.
Thierry Houngues, 51, was born in Lome, the capital of the West African nation of Togo, in 1959 as the second of six children. At age 9 he won an academic scholarship competition and was sent to a Catholic boarding school in Angers, in the Pays de la Loire region of western France.
"It was a little bit hard — 9 is really too young to go so far," he said. "When I had been there a few months I told my teachers that I would return home, just go straight and would get there. I started off walking down the road and after a while I came to a crossroads. Should I go left or right? I didn't know, so after a while I sat down and started to cry. Eventually a local resident found me and drove me back to school."