Rinds: These chefs ditched it all and moved to Paris.
Here is their advice.
Note: This was slated to run in Plate Magazine, a lovely little industry publication which folded this week. Thanks to Liz Grossman for originally picking it up.
In a quiet moment after lunch service, Daniel Rose sits at a two-top amongst the dark wood and elegant mirrors of the empty dining room at his Paris bistro La Bourse et La Vie. Half-jokingly, he offers a tempting proposition.
“Come to France and you can get rich… without ever really making any money.”
It would be tempting to look up from your dairy and egg order, stare out the window, and dream of leaving it all behind for some grand European capital. Paris, for instance. A city of innovative corner cafes, grand old restaurants, and cutting-edge bistronomy, much ink has been spilled on Paris as a dining destination.
More interesting, perhaps: what’s it like doing business here? I went to Paris to speak to American owner-operators who made the jump, to discuss how the clichéd dream of this restaurant mecca compares to its reality.
Perhaps no American chef working today has made a deeper dive into French cooking than Chicago-born Daniel Rose. His two Bistro projects, Le CouCou in New York and La Bourse et La Vie, here in Paris’ 2nd Arrondissement, share a unified vision of French cooking. Operationally, they are a world apart. Rose offers a simple definition. “Well, here in Paris, we are closed Saturdays and Sundays.”
French labor laws and work culture fundamentally change the equation when it comes to staffing and hours of operation. “Payroll is much simpler here. When you hire someone, you hire a whole person, and that person begins accumulating 5 weeks paid vacation from the moment they start. It’s a beautiful thing. It changes the way in which you decide to do things. So you can privilege things like Saturday and Sunday nights off for everyone.”
The cost of labor in a French salaried system represents a greater expense: restaurateurs pay a fixed 42% payroll tax for FOH and BOH staff at the end of the month. “That’s something you can’t adjust if you’ve had a slow month,” he notes. But as an owner, it means Rose can spend more time thinking about the food and the customers, and less managing complex schedules and payroll concerns.
Rose notes a difference in the culture of kitchen work, as well. “I read Kitchen Confidential like everyone else, and I didn’t recognize anything in that book in my experience working in Paris. When I was working my way up, I never saw any drugs, no heavy drinking. We worked late, we went home as soon as possible so we could get as much sleep as possible to go to work in the morning.”
French food only knows how to do one thing well, according to Rose. And that is make things taste more like what they are. “Real luxury in French cuisine is not truffles and caviar, but veal that tastes like veal. The role of the ingredient cannot be overstated,” he says.
Both Le Coucou and La Bourse are hyper focused on sourcing. The food costs associated with all that perfect French product break down about the same as sourcing the best stuff in New York. “But ‘best’ can mean different things,” explains Rose. “Here, if you ask for the best thing, they are going to bring you the best thing. They aren’t going to bring you the best thing for your margin, or their margin, or someone else’s. They’re going to bring you the best product they can find, regardless of how much money they make on it.”
Rose spends more time in the kitchen at Le Coucou than at La Bourse these days. “New York has a lot going for it. You can create enormous amounts of wealth in the states, it’s great. But at what cost? We don’t often answer that in the US. In France, we ask that question also. What is the real cost of what we’re doing? What is the real cost of a French restaurant?”
It was a dish at Rose’s previous spot, La Vielle, that helped inspire Mashama Bailey about what might be possible for her style of cuisine in Paris.
The radical simplicity of a plate of duck breast, adorned with some carrots and turnips. No sauce. “I thought, how the fuck can he get away with that! But I was obsessed with it. It was so clean, and so pure, and so good.”
I’m sitting in a corner bar called Le Flores in the 7th with Mashama and business partner Johno Morisono. In late 2019, they left Savannah and barricaded themselves in an apartment in Paris’ 7th Arrondissement, determined to finish the manuscript of their acclaimed co-memoir, Black, White, and the Grey. The lodging wasn’t luxurious— two bedrooms across a thin corridor, with a copy of their manuscript on the kitchen table between them. Morisano and Bailey, business partners at The Grey, spent their days writing and editing, and then sunk into the historic banquettes of the Rive Gauche’s Bistros de Quartier by evening. In 2023, they announced plans to open one of their own.
But that’s where the romance gave way to reality. Their new space, formerly the home of a long-standing neighborhood cafe called L’Esperance, required a gut renovation. To install a new exhaust system, they had to get consent from the building’s syndicat de coproprietaires, a sort of tenants and owners union, who can wield a lot of power when it comes to commerce, construction, and architectural work, particularly in a neighborhood as historic as Paris’ 7th. And they were having absolutely none of it.
Bailey + Co scheduled multiple neighborhood meetings to discuss their plans, which just gave the building’s syndicat more opportunities to vocalize about their opposition to a buzzy restaurant opening downstairs. “We want them to know we’re good people,” says Bailey. Adds Morisano: “If it takes 8 or 10 years to build that trust, then that’s what we’ll do.”
The team is also working hard to bridge the gap between The Grey’s lauded brand of southern hospitality and the discrete, Michelin-informed points of service which are status-quo in Paris bistros. Their plan to do so centers around retaining and elevating a handful of staff from the former L’Esperance space, who will spend time in Savannah and form the core of the opening front-of-house team.
Slated to open this summer, Bailey and co. plan to tell the story of port-city southern cuisine, and more broadly the idea of regional american styles, to a Paris neighborhood steeped in tradition. Their palpable love for the neighborhood, and the bumps they have experienced along the way, can’t help but form the foundation on which that bridge is being built.
In a long and winding career merging art and cuisine, Orly Zeitoun’s greatest professional accomplishment might be the nickname she has acquired amongst the neighborhood kids in Paris’s 9th arrondissement.
“Madame Gateau Chocolat” holds court at Snack Attack, the sandwich shop and catering operation Zeitoun runs out of a sliver of storefront not far from Montmartre.
A photography project that traced Zeitoun’s Judeo-Tunisian family history through the recipes of her grandmother led her out of the art world and into a career in food. Her leap to Paris was made slightly smoother by holding an EU passport and having grown up in a Francophone household. In 2022, along her usual walk to work at a nearby Italian restaurant, she noticed an empty storefront in her neighborhood and made an offer.
At Snack Attack, the average lunch ticket runs about 17 EU and makes up about 70 percent of her total business, with catering jobs rounding out the other 30. Like Rose, her opening hours are consistent and reasonable: lunch, three hours a day, five days a week.
Orly notes that a lot of the stability and support that comes standard as an employed cook in Paris, like consistent pay and days off, are given up when opening your own business.
“I’ve been lucky that Snack Attack has been profitable every year I’ve been open, but I’m here all the time. I’m here usually 10 hours a day, six days a week, and more when we have catering jobs.” It’s not so straightforward to hire a little part-time help to back up a busy month.
Snack Attack does not hide its American-ness, and Orly is happy to be “L’Americaine” of the neighborhood, even if her food and her personal story contain so many more points of reference. She jokes that she and her one employee speak “Franglais all day.” A stack of diner mugs sits next to the cash register. The menu has quirky names for its 12 items, like “The Mega Mega” and “Obscene Racine.” Parisians have warmed to Zeitoun’s warm style of hospitality. And particularly amongst the local 12 and under crowd, business for her chocolate chip cookies and birthday cakes is booming.
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Great piece, thanks for sharing here. Looking forward to reading more and checking out recommended spots when I’m back in Paris this summer.