"Why did I leave Japan? I guess it's because I had nothing to do back home," says Paris-based chef Sota Atsumi as he takes a coffee break from prepping scallops for his dinner guests. "I didn't study much, so enrolling in a university was not an option. I wanted to be a professional snowboarder but I gave up due to an injury."
Atsumi, recently described by food critics as one of a recent surge of "rebellious French chefs," took the recommendation of one of his high school teachers to go to France to be a chef.
"I didn't necessarily aspire to be one, but always found cooking entertaining," he says, adding that one of his earliest childhood memories is his grandmother's simple home cooked dishes, like curry rice. "It's not like I was obsessed with France either."