He’s got wild curly black hair, a permanent smile, a French accent and is endorsed by Jamie Oliver. What’s not to like?

The rise of the food influencer/blogger/YouTube-er seems unstoppable. Fresh-faced, ebullient, media savvy and French, Alexis Gabriel Ainouz is here to teach the kids how to cook.

He assumes his readers love food, in a’where’s the next pop-up happening and what’s awesome on the menu?’ way and that they also have difficulty telling one end of a knife from the other. And that kitchens rather scare them.

Pas de probleme! He says, as he sets out to teach the rookies how to rustle up food that will have their friends Instagramming like crazy.He favours food that is cheap, not a bad idea as most people under 25 are on a bit of a budget, and he keeps it pretty simple as many are cooking in kitchens the size of cupboards.

90 recipes in all, from the very simple to classic French dishes that aren’t impossible to recreate when stripped down – Onion Soup, Tarte Flambé Pizza and Steak Tartare.

Of course this is cooking for millennials so you won’t find too much’boring’ old French food here, there has to be ramen too, wraps, macaroni cheese, ahi poke, fried rice, banh mi, pulled pork and all the things you might find on a passing food truck.

And there are’hacks’, there have to be hacks these days. Useful ways to simplify things and take handy shortcuts to get to food faster.There’s are pages about dried spices, explaining what each gives to a dish, how to efficiently chop an onion and how to perfectly cook a steak.

The recipes are endearing and undoubtedly what’people want to cook’. Plenty of choice, clear instructions and little stories that will have his female followers swooning.And he does discuss knives and what to buy.

Under the obvious cashing in on current trends, this is actually a very decent cookbook even without all the decoration designed to make it appeal to the young.

Buy it for yourself, if just starting out in the kitchen as he’s much better than many of the other pretty young things doing the same thing, or get it for someone you know who needs a great primer to get going in the kitchen.

Le French Guy, vraiment il n’est pas mal.

{ISBN:1787132234}