In June 2016, 11 refugee chefs were invited into Parisian kitchens for an evening to cook food from their homeland. The Refugee Food Festival sought to re-write the largely negative narrative surrounding refugees and demonstrate the cultural vibrance they can share with the cultures in which they attempt to re-build their lives. This thesis is rooted in the lived experiences of four refugee chefs living and working in Paris. It explores how refugees utilize cuisine as a language with which to communicate and how ‘embodied apprenticeships’ can take the place of language. Furthermore, it examines how refugee chefs negotiate their identity within a liminal space, their journey to reclaim agency, how their culinary memories connect them to their homeland and how varied notions of culinary authenticity can be witnessed in the experiences of these chefs. For these refugee chefs, the multi-cultural kitchen in which they work serves as a microcosm for French society, where the tensions they experience inside the walls of the kitchen as culinary outsiders represent their larger negotiation of identity and place in France.