L’Arrêt by the Gray Paris–French Restaurant Review | EUROtoday

Alexander Lobrano meets two expat American cooks within the capital and suggestions a rising southern expertise for Michelin stardom…

“When good Americans die, they go to Paris,” Oscar Wilde famously quipped in regards to the ardour so many Yankees have felt and nonetheless really feel for the French capital. In a time of political flux within the States, it appears as if the predilection of worldly, well-educated Americans for the town has jolted into overdrive.

Estate brokers report brisk gross sales of Paris flats within the toniest quarters of the Left Bank, but additionally within the Marais and ninth and seventeenth arrondissements, to Americans who need a European footprint, with an eye fixed to attainable everlasting relocation.

The new American inflow can also be artistic, because the metropolis has at all times been a spot that is nourished North American artists, writers and bohemians, together with cooks, too. The newest newcomer is Mashama Bailey, who’s received a number of James Beard Awards for her Southern port-city cooking at The Grey, a restaurant housed within the outdated Art Deco Greyhound bus station in Savannah, Georgia.

Bailey educated in New York City and at Anne Willan’s well-known Burgundy cooking college, La Varenne (now closed). She and her enterprise associate, New Yorker restaurateur John O. Morisano, are Francophiles who’ve at all times dreamed of opening a restaurant in Paris, so two years in the past, they took the plunge and bought the previous Café L’Espérance on rue de l’Université, within the Faubourg Saint-Germain on the Left Bank. “I wanted to refine the cooking I’ve been doing at The Gray in Paris using French ingredients and also by exploring the reciprocal influence of French cooking on the kitchens of Charleston, Savannah, Mobile and New Orleans, and the way in which new products, flavors and techniques crossed the Atlantic to France from America,” explains Bailey. “I’ve just always dreamed of living in Paris,” says Morisano.

So after two arduous years of authorized battles over the constructing the place they’re positioned – the upstairs neighbors have been disinclined to let the pair set up a obligatory new air flow system as a result of they did not need a busy restaurant on the bottom flooring of their constructing – they formally opened on September 16, 2025.

Though Paris is mad for American hand-held meals like cheeseburgers, bagels, donuts, tacos, pizza and lobster rolls, the menu at L’Arrêt challenges the French on gastronomic turf they think about their very own – cooking outlined by subtlety and respect for the perfect seasonal produce. One wonders if the French will be capable of transfer past the tenacious stereotype they maintain that Americans subsist on the junk meals they secretly love. But if anybody can coax them in the direction of a scrumptious and deeper understanding of American cooking, it is absolutely Mashama Bailey.

“My menu will evolve all the time,” she says. “We’ll serve roasted oysters throughout oyster season, however they will not be there throughout the summer season.
Certain dishes shall be signatures, although, just like the NYC sandwich (egg, bacon, cheddar in a bun) served at breakfast.

There’s additionally the Poulet Captain, a succulent preparation of hen braised in curried tomato and pepper sauce with currants and almonds, a colonial traditional all the way in which from the kitchens of Charleston, South Carolina.

And simply to let the locals know that Morisano and Bailey have mastered the snobbisms of the district, cheeses come from Barthélemy, the famend native cheesemonger, and the ice cream and sorbet are provided by Le Bac à Glaces within the rue du Bac.

36 Rue de l’Université, seventh arrondissement, Paris,

Such. (33) 09 84 00 09 08

www.larretparis.fr

Lunch menus €25, €33, common à la carte €40.

From France Today Magazine

Lead photograph credit score: L’Arret Paris Chess Pie – Photo credit_ Ilya KAGAN @ilyafoodstories-export-light-16