From the House of Lords to a Garden Villa in Vientiane: Meet the Chef Behind HOME

Forty years ago, Jean-Yves Guiomar was washing dishes in a luxury hotel in the French Alps. Today he runs the kitchen at HOME, a French restaurant set in a 1960s villa in Vientiane, Laos. The distance between those two points is the story of a career — and, in a quieter way, the reason the food here tastes the way it does.

How does a kitchen porter become a chef?

By watching. His first job was as a kitchen porter, at the very bottom of the brigade. From the sink, he watched the head chef send out service after service with a full team behind him, and decided that was the job he wanted.

He began training as a chef in 1988. His teacher, in Brittany, came from the Compagnons du Tour de France — the centuries-old French guild system in which a young craftsman travels from workshop to workshop, learning a trade from masters rather than from a classroom. It is one of the most demanding apprenticeships in French cooking, and it leaves a mark: a respect for method that never quite goes away.

There is a detail he likes to tell. When he arrived in Paris, the first head chef he ever worked under was Laotian. More than thirty years later, he would move to Laos himself.

What does a French chef actually spend his time learning?

Stocks and sauces, mostly.

In London and the north of England, Jean-Yves went deep into the classical texts — Auguste Escoffier and Antonin Carême, the two chefs who codified French cuisine as it is still taught today. He specialised in the foundation of that cuisine: the stocks and sauce bases that everything else is built on.

He is unapologetic about what that costs. For a beef stock, he will pour in a great deal of red wine and Madeira without hesitating. Chasing a flavour, he says, is not somewhere he sets himself a limit.

This is the part of a chef’s training a diner never sees and always tastes. A sauce made properly takes days of accumulated work before it reaches the plate.

He cooked at the House of Lords — for whom?

For several years, Jean-Yves worked in the catering kitchens of the House of Lords in London. He cooked for Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair.

In the year the Queen presided over the State Opening of Parliament, one of his creations was selected to appear on the Queen’s menu: a cassolette of snails with morels in puff pastry. He is careful about how he tells this — he was not the Queen’s chef, and he does not claim to have been. A dish of his was chosen. In a kitchen that size, that is distinction enough.

And the jazz club?

He also ran the kitchen at Ronnie Scott’s, the legendary Soho jazz club, where he cooked for Van Morrison, Jamie Cullum, Wynton Marsalis, George Benson, Chaka Khan, Eric Clapton and Elton John.

Earlier, as a sous-chef at a French restaurant in Covent Garden, his guests included Sigourney Weaver and Keira Knightley.

Ask him about any of it and he will talk about the service, not the names. That is usually how you can tell a cook from a celebrity.

Why Laos?

In 2012 he had had enough of the pace of London. He travelled south, and kept going, and stopped in Vientiane.

He took over the kitchen at the Settha Palace, the city’s colonial-era boutique hotel. In 2019 he opened his own restaurant, You Na, which reached a Google rating of 4.9.

Then HOME.

What does that mean for what is on the plate?

It means the classical repertoire, cooked properly, with what Laos actually grows.

The menu at HOME is French, and it does not pretend otherwise: ballotine of duck foie gras, hand-cut beef tartare, gravlax of salmon cured in HOME Gin, bone-in beef rib to share, rack of lamb, seared scallops, roasted camembert, crêpes flambéed at the table. Alongside them sit ingredients that come from a few hours’ drive away — burrata made in Luang Prabang, herbs and produce from local growers.

The wine list is built rather than bought in, and the cellar is part of the dining room rather than hidden behind it.

Where to find him

HOME is at Hom 10, Ban Watnak, Sisattanak District, Vientiane — a 1960s villa with a garden, a pool and a wine cellar, ten minutes from the centre of the city.

Lunch is served 11:00 to 14:00, Monday to Saturday. Dinner from 17:30, until 22:30 from Monday to Thursday and 23:00 on Friday and Saturday. Closed Sunday. The garden and poolside tables are the ones to ask for in the evening, and the villa can be hired privately for dinners, receptions and company events.

Reservations: +856 20 56 326 515, by WhatsApp, or online.

You are not just eating a French meal here. You are eating forty years of it.