Chef Thomas Chisholm

With almost 15 years of experience, born in 1991, Thomas Chisholm is a young creative and technical French-American chef who advocates a transdisciplinary approach to cooking. 

After spending the first part of his life in New York City, he arrived in France, in Perpignan, at the age of 14 and joined the cooking school of the Catalan city. 

In 2011, having just graduated from a professional baccalaureate of cooking, he went to work near Nîmes for chef Christophe Ducros*, in the gastronomic restaurant of a Relais & Châteaux hotel. He went in as a line cook and out as a sous-chef two years later. 

In 2014, he decided to move to Paris to work in the Michelin-starred restaurants of the capital: Itinéraires* (Sylvain Sendra), and the Sur Mesure** (Thierry Marx). 

In 2014, he decided to move to Paris to work in the Michelin-starred restaurants of the capital: Itinéraires* (Sylvain Sendra), and the Sur Mesure** (Thierry Marx). In 2018, he took a position as a sous-chef at the restaurant 6 Paul Bert, made famous by the restaurateur Bertrand Auboyneau. In 2019, he joined the team of the restaurant AT, where he became the second of chef Atsushi Tanaka. In 2021, he took part in season 12 of Top Chef France and made a remarkable passage: between experiments on visual and taste, Thomas Chisholm reveals his graphic touch and his mastery of strong flavors. 

Today, his multiple culinary and cultural influences blend with his experience and his technique to create ingenious dishes, in line with his vision of cuisine based on the fusion of disciplines, a clean sourcing and a great creativity at the service of taste. 

With Chocho, Thomas achieves his dream: to make an audacious and reasoned cuisine in a relaxed, simple, living setting.

… CHOCHO is DADA! The name was chosen for its sound and not for its meaning. The idea is to be free from meaning and leave room only for pleasure and freedom, keywords of the Chef’s approach in the kitchen.

The menu is designed with small plates to share, on the Catalan style of tapas, dear to the Chef. This is the only rule of his kitchen at ChoCho: the format. For the rest, the Chef does not forbid anything and plays with his different culinary, cultural (American – French – Catalan) and artistic influences.

Eating at CHOcho means eating with your eyes first: the Chef and his team offer customers a surprising visual experience thanks to a free approach of cooking. In the dishes, the tastes are strong: the Chef likes to push the flavors, playing on the acidity, the bitterness, the umami or the smoked taste – the thread of his dishes – that he obtains thanks to a finish of the cooking with a binchotan. Finally, in a logic of respect for the micro-seasons, the basement of CHOCHO is built little by little as a real reserve of syrups, vinegars and various lacto-fermentations… so many materials for the creation of powerful condiments! binchotan. Enfin, dans une logique du respect des micro-saisons, le sous-sol de CHOCHO se construit petit à petit comme une véritable réserve de sirops, vinaigres et lacto-fermentations diverses… tant de matières pour la création de condiments puissants !

If you come to eat at choCHO, you can chat with your neighbors by settling down on the large central table d'hôte or enjoy a proximity with the cooks by settling down at the open kitchen’s counter (and why not enjoy some surprises!). To complete the friendly atmosphere, the music is centered around hip-hop playlists: from Wu-Tang Clan to Anderson Paak.

Local ceramists have created custom-made and exclusive models for the restaurant: Lou Thomas (Simoneloo ceramics – Montreuil), Stéphane Caudron (No Ceramic – Bagnolet) or Karla Sutra (Perpignan/Paris) – who also created tiles of earthenware and inspired illustrations with Dadaist references. The circle is complete.