We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful MYRIAM & Jean DANDONNEAU. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with MYRIAM & Jean below.

Hi MYRIAM & Jean , thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear your thoughts about family businesses.

We are the typical family business. Husband and wife working together all day taking care of three restaurants. We love working together and we work as a very solid team. We are complementing each other and are always taking important decisions the two of us. This is a real strenght. We also take care of our staff like family. We often help them in their life and try to help them to grow in our business. We have many employees that are with us for almost the beginning. For us sharing our French family history very influenced by food and wine is very important. We use our grandparents recipe in the restaurant to maintain this family history. Our daughter Chloe who lives in France help us to keep in touch with the actual trends in the food business in France, Our son Valentin can wait to be old enough to start working in our restaurants too. The pitfall could be that our personal life and professional life are totally mixed up. Most of our conversations are about our business. Sometimes of one us, or even Valentin can feel that this is too much in our life, but finally we all love it.
Sharing a professional passion with the one you love is all in all an accomplishment !

MYRIAM & Jean , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

We are Myriam and Jean Dandonneau. Both born in France, Myriam in Paris, Jean in Provins, a medieval city in the Brie area. We are both engineers in computer science and met at work while working in a cell phone company. We share a history and love for food and wine. Our dream week end was to leave on Friday night for a Michelin star restaurant and stay the week end here and discover a region of France. Between 2014 and 2015 we did many trip to Florida and fell literally in love, We then decided to mix our two passions : Florida and food. We opened a French restaurant and bakery and recently open two new locations. We love to share French culture by talking everyday to our customers. A lot of our staff is French also. We do monthly wine tasting where we have more the occasion to go deeply in a specific region of France. What we love in Florida is the kindness of our customers. French can have the reputation to be grumpy and sometimes it is true ! But not in Florida, we get so many positive energy, this is simply wonderful. Mademoiselle Paris is a good description of Myriam. A free woman who loves life, having fun and of course love food and wine and especially Champagne. We want our brand to represent this hedonism !

How’d you meet your business partner?

Jean was leading a transformation project in an IT company, where he has been working for years. One day, he got introduced to Myriam and fell in love instantly. We discovered very soon we have many passions in common : tennis, architecture, music but above all a passion for gastronomy. We went to numerous great restaurants in France and many of the owners are now our friends. We love to give the address to our customers to go to France. We love being together and many people call us “the inseparables”. Opening our restaurants and creating our brand has been a dream for us but also took a lot of energy. But when one of us is down, the other will immediately take the relay

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

When we decided to leave France to live in Florida, we just finished to built a house that has been the project of our life at this moment. We managed the construction by ourselves, but also did many things ourselves : painting, tiles, landscaping and much more. We decided to sell the house and as this was a very unique house in the area we managed to get a price which allowed us not only to settle comfortably in Florida but also to invest in our first location. We also had to sell our wine cellar, we had at this time almost one thousand bottles of wine, every one of this bottle was picked with love, and this was also a good source for our investment. Even if when wine is your passion each bottle that was sold was hard to swallow !

Contact Info:

• Website: www.mademoiselleparis.com
• Instagram: @mademoiselleparis.utc
• Facebook: @lovemademoiselleparis.com