At the annual gathering of France’s finest chefs for the Michelin Guide awards this year, the talk was not only about whose restaurants had gained or lost a star.
“Everyone’s discussing AI. I was at a table of 12 other chefs, and it was the main thing we talked about,” Matan Zaken, who runs the one-Michelin-star Nhome restaurant in Paris, said at the event at the end of March.
The 32-year-old believes that some of his peers are reluctant to admit just how much they are already consulting services such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT to help them with recipes and ideas.
“You’d be amazed to know how many people are using it. There are a lot of egos in the business. They’re not going to make a big thing about it,” he said.
Zaken has made a point of openly embracing the technology, which he says has the potential to produce surprising new pairings of ingredients, offering the possibility of palate-twisting discoveries for diners.