"As a child, I didn't watch cartoons, but cooking shows. I learned my first recipes thanks to television." Born to a French father and a Japanese mother, Marie Méon lived in Tokyo until she was 18. Her studies at the Ecole Camondo in design and architecture brought her to Paris, where she still lives today.

During her early career as a retail designer at Dior and then Chanel, where she was in charge of store layout, she rediscovered the taste of her Tokyo childhood, organizing Saturday evening dinners at her home.

On the menu: a unique selection of simple Japanese dishes: kakuni (braised pork belly) stuffed with ginger and sprinkled with mirin (sweet rice wine), fish crudo seasoned with homemade ponzu (a citrus-based sauce) and a gomae spinach salad. "I realized how much I enjoyed suffering while cooking alone for 30 people," she jokes. "There was good feedback, it gave me confidence."

So much so that she decided to take her CAP cuisine, the French culinary diploma. Now at the head of the creative agency Manger Manger, which she founded in 2016, Méon creates meals and buffets for fashion and luxury labels, with a mix of Japanese flavors, where the eggs are jellied in dashi broth, the salad is seasoned with miso and the seared white asparagus sleeps on a bed of ajoblanco, an Andalusian soup made from almonds.

Méon herself feeds on art. She is interested in Arte Povera and conceptual art, and the menus she meticulously stages are installation-style, bespoke commissioned works that require lengthy conception. "I follow the same process as when I was an interior designer," explained Méon, who considers herself neither a chef nor a caterer. "I do an enormous amount of research, creative suggestions, mood boards, and I work on content proposals... what do we eat, how do we eat it, what do we eat it in?"

A long piece of sliced bamboo, a mother-of-pearl seashell and a flower-pot saucer all serve as unusual containers. To make the experience complete, and to break the ice, Méon likes to involve her guests. Like at the dinner for Spanish fashion house Loewe, where each guest, equipped with a watercolorist's palette filled with different colored seasonings and herbs, had to create his or her own appetizer with the help of scissors, tweezers and brushes, scallops and radishes.

Until recently, the culinary designer worked on projects from home – often on her own, but sometimes in a shared laboratory, or for very large dinners (some for 800 people) in collaboration with caterers and their maître d'hôtel service. But from now on, she will be bringing all her activities together in one place: "It's not a big place, it's a sort of showcase where I'd like to present more personal, more visual creations." The new space houses the herbal infusions and spice blends (dukkah, flower salt and sesame) that Méon concocts. There are creations she already offers on the Manger Manger website, such as the mouth-blown glassware she designs herself.

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