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William D'Auvray

Executive Chef/Partner

D'Auvray's distinguished career is steeped in French cuisine and honed with Japanese technique. It spans decades of training under culinary legends from Southern California, France, and D.C. – including Michel Richard, Jean-Francois Meteigner, Joachim Splichal, Wolfgang Puck, and Hidemasa Yamamoto. 

His formal education includes an apprenticeship at Scandia in Los Angeles when he was only 15, staging across France for weeks at a time in bistros and Michelin-starred restaurants, and a decade with French-trained Japanese chefs, where he mastered the art of applying classic French and Japanese techniques to seasonal and global ingredients. D’Auvray continues today to refine his own personal style with the innovative Asian-inspired French cuisine that once revolutionized French food in the US.

D’Auvray – who spent his childhood in the Philippines and grew up in Beverly Hills – was raised on the French classics at home with his French-born father. An early appreciation for this cuisine made Michel Richard's Pâtisseries in Beverly Hills and Hollywood Hills a natural place for D’Auvray to begin in the kitchen. By the time he was 20, D’Auvray was fortunate to have spent four years under Japanese chefs at the storied Chaya Brasserie and La Petite Chaya in Los Angeles at the very moment when they were pioneering “Cali-Asian” cuisine in the US – an innovative globally-inspired cuisine that would set the tone for his own personal style and esteemed culinary career. When he worked under the renowned Chef Patrick Healy at Colette in West Hollywood, D’Auvray was encouraged to travel to France to learn about ingredients and techniques. 

After his time in France, he continued working at Colette while taking roles at the legendary L’Orangerie under Jean Francois Meteigner and other California kitchens like Muse, Ma Maison, and Max au Triangle under a young Wolfgang Puck and Joachim Splichal. These fundamental years taught D’Auvray to apply classic techniques to seasonal and global ingredients, which is still signature to style today.

With a keen interest in seafood, D’Auvray spent the next years working with Japanese seafood masters Hidemasa Yamamoto and Fujimoto Fukui. When they moved from L.A. to take over the legendary Jockey Club at the Ritz Carlton in Washington, D.C., D’Auvray joined them. His expertise in seafood was honed during these years, culminating in his leadership at the famous Jockey Club and cooking for two presidents and their cabinet members.

Family ties brought D’Auvray to North Carolina and in 1992 Giorgios Bakatsias tapped him to open Parizade where he set the tone for the next 35 years of exceptional fine dining. In 1997, D’Auvray introduced his global seafood cuisine to Raleigh with the opening of his first restaurant, Fins, which earned a 4/4-star review and garnered national attention by Bon Appetit as one of the "Best Seafood Restaurants” in the country in 2008.

After 13 wildly successful years, D'Auvray closed Fins to introduce more casual global dishes at bu.ku. Restaurant consulting took D’Auvray to Maine and Florida, and when he returned to North Carolina, he lent his consulting expertise to Parizade, Vidrio, Lula’s and Lulu Bang Bang, before Bakatsias tapped him to lead East End Bistrot as Executive Chef in 2023.

D’Auvray is now the Executive Chef and Managing Partner of East End Bistrot, which repeatedly earns recognition as “Best New Restaurant,” “Restaurant of the Year” and “Best Restaurant” by Eater Carolinas, News Observer, Raleigh Magazine, Axios, and Infatuation.