My cooking - while thoroughly French - is profoundly cosmopolitan. I was fortunate enough to begin travelling at a young age, when impressions are at their most vivid and when I still had little idea of how my cooking would take shape.

However, Pierre, my father, was one of the first French chefs to work in Japan (at Maxim's in Tokyo); Olympe, my mother, came from an Italian family and as a child I probably tasted the cooking of my maternal grandmother, la Mémé Forte, much more often than that of Restaurant Troisgros. But all this happened within the context of my life in Roanne. Then Michel Guérard sent me to New York, where suddenly I experienced real diversity: California opened the doors to Asia and also showed me, at Alice Waters' restaurant Chez Panisse, Italy and the Mediterranean in a different light.

Home cooking, which is often executed by women, also fascinates me as a cook. Watching Mémé Forte work in the kitchen, I saw her capacity to handle food with a natural skill that gave her cooking a kind of innocence. Even when things didn't turn out the way she had planned. I feel the same way about Italian cooking, which for a long time kept a distance from haute cuisine and preserved a real ingenuousness.

Then there is acidity , which is a recurring theme in my cooking. It's almost everywhere and it often helps structure a dish, creating a backbone - the elements in the plate all relate to it and it makes sense of the whole. If bitterness represents a serious side in the palette of taste, acidity often provides a note of irony.

Though the cooking in a restaurant such as the one in Roanne is restrictive in many ways, I have always sought to create a sense of freedom and openness. The great variety of flavours and techniques offered by the world provided the first revelation. The passion that I share with Marie-Pierre for contemporary art has helped me discover how other creators, in very different fields, are also in search of this freedom. Spending time with artists, painters, sculptors and architects - and also, to a lesser degree perhaps, actors, writers and musicians - has affected us greatly. Like my American experience, it has opened my eyes to the incredible diversity the world has to offer.

I would like my cooking to be modern. It's free of nostalgia - which is not to say that it doesn't care about history - because, like Marie-Pierre, I'm in tune with our times, curious about everything, wanting to understand every aspect of this era. My style is light, fluid and luminous, and incredibly joyful. Probably because light is never sad, simply because light is life.