Hervé Fleury
For Hervé Fleury, an elegant man and distinguished gourmet, the beau geste is not just an innate quality, but a concept full of significance, the foundations of French gastronomic tradition. Sense of hospitality and attention to detail – part of his DNA and refined during his long career – led him to his current position as executive vice president at the Institut Paul Bocuse, the school for cuisine and management founded by the chef du siecle from Lyon.
His grandfather was a farmer but became a restaurateur with four restaurants in Paris. His father and uncle established themselves in international tourism. Hence Hervé Fleury chose the hospitality industry: his career started in 1981, as sales and marketing director at Grand Metropolitan Hotel in London, then New York and Brussels, at Meridien in Paris and working for Frantel. He then moved to the operational management of Accor, one of the largest hotel groups in France, where he runs the global restaurant offer. In 1998 Gérard Péllisson, cofounder at Accor and president of the board of directors at the Institut Paul Bocuse called him: he invited him to direct the school in Lyon, founded in 1990.
Honoured to be working with such professionals and men as Bocuse and Péllisson, monsieur Fleury accepted and since 1999 he conveys his sense of hospitality in this centre of excellence, the first place to teach cooking and hospitality as a university curriculum. In 2015 he left the general direction to Dominique Giraudier and was promoted executive vice president; the following year he received the title of Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur for his work at the institute.
Recently awarded as Best innovative training programme in the hospitality industry, since 2008 the Institut Paul Bocuse is also a centre for research, where PhD students focus on three main fields: health & wellbeing, taste & pleasure, business & management. But the pillar of the school is still conveying French tradition, of which they teach the techniques, and the beau geste that is typical of its cooking, service and management.
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Identità Milano
Mathematician by chance, gourmand by passion, she loves to travel around the world – what with conferences on mathematics and chefs’ congresses – and tell stories about food and their passionate and fascinating protagonists