Culinary Currents
April 2005

Hyatt’s Houston Executive Chef Jean Moysan:
A French Classic

By Peter Langlois

Born in Burgundy, France, Chef Jean Moysan of the Hyatt Regency, Houston, is everything I love to see in an executive chef. His training in France and his experience working in the French Navy for a Four Star Admiral, at the two star Le Cerf Volant Restaurant in Auxerre, France, opening a French restaurant in Miami Beach, Florida, being the executive chef for the David William Hotel in Coral Gables, Fla., and ultimately joining Hyatt, is classic. With Hyatt he has worked three properties: Dallas-Forth Worth Airport, the Hyatt Regency Denver, Colo., and—for the last nine years—the Hyatt Regency in downtown Houston.

As I talked with Chef Jean in his office late one Friday afternoon, I found myself reminiscing about my own food and beverage days when chefs were chefs, not book writers or television celebrities. You see it took only a matter of seconds before I instinctively knew Chef Jean is the real deal.

At the top of his career, he still spends from 7 A.M. to 10 P.M. six days a week immersed in the passion of doing anything the guests would like while they are staying at the Hyatt Regency. “If a guest wants eggs over easy at Midnight, we do it cheerfully. If a guest is in any of our restaurants and wants an item from another one of the other restaurants, we do it,” he told me. “Basically, it’s all about the guest.” While it’s currently in vogue to be “customer-centric,” it’s obviously been standard operating procedure for great foodservice operators forever.

Running a 900-plus-room property demands a lot, and Hyatt’s standards of performance both aesthetically and financially are high. Chef Jean is equally proud of his performance in both areas. We were talking about holiday menus for Easter, Mother’s Day, Thanksgiving, and New Year’s Eve, so I asked Chef how he kept up with insuring consistency and quality. He pulled one of several notebooks down from the shelf above his desk and we started to go through his standardized recipes, costs, and plate diagrams for one operation.

It turns out that chef had personally done all the work associated with recipes, costing and plate presentations. Let somebody else cost out recipes like the Cost Control Manager? Those days are long gone, according to Chef Jean. What still goes on in this Hyatt kitchen, however, is butchering and making all pastries and baked goods in-house. “My day must start with coffee and a fresh croissant, still warm and crunchy,” he said. “My guests deserve the same.”

All great chefs are teachers, and here Chef Jean also shines. Students from nearby Barbara Jordan High School and Galena Park High School work part-time at the Hyatt learning knife skills and building speed. He also has two students from The Art Institute of Houston-Culinary working nights while attending school during the day. He’s my kind of chef, no doubt.

My other research revealed Chef Jean has another great passion, fishing. One of my colleagues said that on a fishing excursion out of Galveston, he sat along side Chef Jean. While my associate was pulling out throwbacks and baitfish, Chef was snaking out one big fish after another. I’m not at all surprised. This chef fishes in deepwater all day long.