Culinary Director Pierre-Marie Leprince builds community through food

After a lifetime of experience in restaurants from Paris to Beijing to Baltimore to the Bahamas, Pierre-Marie Leprince has joined Front Porch Communities and Services as its Corporate Culinary Director, responsible for the management and oversight of the dining programs for Front Porch’s 16 residential communities throughout California.

Leprince was intrigued by the job description, which sought someone who could create a transformative dining experience for our residents. “I’ve never seen anything phrased like that,” says Leprince. “I realized everybody was trying to create a restaurant in senior living, but I needed to recalibrate myself. What interests me about what I do with food and with the meal experience is it is all about emotions. And I need to draw my emotions, my source, my inspiration from being at home, not being in a restaurant.”

Growing up in the Brittany region of France, the 6^th of 8 children, Leprince says life took place around the kitchen table. Very early, he discovered the joy and satisfaction of bringing friends and family around a table and serving home-made food for them to enjoy, inspiring him to pursue a career as a cook. He attended culinary school in southwest France, where he studied under Michelin Star Chef Jean Vessat and won a culinary competition in Bordeaux for apprentice chefs. Moving to Paris, he worked at Maxim’s, then took an opportunity to become sous chef at Maxim’s of Paris in Beijing. Years of travel and a range of roles in the culinary world followed, including managing the culinary operations for a fleet of 18 ships in the Princess Cruise Lines.

After four years at Princess cruises and becoming a US citizen, “I realized that what was really keeping me engaged in my work was that it had to be connected with helping chefs and operators.” In 2015, Leprince co-founded 3Di Creative Food Concepts, a consulting firm that helped organizations respond to customer demands and provided innovative solutions for culinary and hospitality professionals, before applying for the role at Front Porch.

Excellence in dining is a high priority for Front Porch. “I want Front Porch to provide an extraordinary dining experience that reminds our residents of the best food they’ve ever had,” says Jeff Sianko, Front Porch’s Chief Operating Officer. Residents are looking for quality ingredients, amazing flavors, and exciting and diverse menus, and “We need to deliver on our promise to make that experience the best it can be.”

Senior living offers some unique challenges in the hospitality field, Leprince says. As opposed to restaurants or cruise ships, which offer the feeling of a “home away from home,” senior living communities are home, while at the same time each community has strict regulatory and healthcare requirements for food safety protocols. 

To meet those requirements in a way that feels like home, Leprince says, “There is one way: the ingredients must belong to the residents.” Leprince doesn’t mean residents need to provide the food; instead, through building connections with local producers who will become part of the “culinary community”, meals will be transformed from items on a menu to food that residents can see as their own. By cooking with fresh pasta made on site, tomatoes from a local farm, and herbs grown in the community garden, a simple pasta dish is no longer pasta with sauce, Leprince explains; “It is their pasta, with their sauce, their basil, their flavors, their ingredients from their kitchen.”

It’s this sense of community that comes from dining that Leprince wants to build and nurture, a sense that is central to what Front Porch does, according to Sianko. “Dining is at the heart of everything we do. It brings people together in community to share a meal, and as a result, provides an experience that is essential to our mission.”

And dining is individual to each community, says Leprince. After visiting each community, “the most important thing I’ve learned is that every community has its own DNA, has its own opportunities,” he says. “One of my goals is to give complete freedom to the communities with the menu they are serving,” based on local connections and preferences. Behind the scenes, Leprince will be applying his experience with culinary technologies and yield utilization management to extract the most value from purchases, so that each community’s chef can focus on cooking and composing with ingredients.

Sianko says, “Pierre-Marie has the experience and ability to create a vision of amazing food and dining, and then transfer that vision to our communities. He’s skilled at how to create great food, but more importantly, how to train our staff to meet those goals and expectations.” 

Leprince is looking forward to seeing the vision become reality. “I want to see what I have in my head happening in reality in a community, and being a participant in that,” he says. “I want to see a shift in the community because there is a gravitational pull from the kitchen from the food that changes the way residents feel and makes them better from a wellness point of view. Not having them sitting on the sideline, making comments, but being directly part of it every day.”

And once everything is running smoothly, would he like to cook for the residents? “That would be the cherry on the cake for me.”