“My Paris is not the city of champagne and caviar,” the jazz pianist Hazel Scott wrote in an essay reprinted in Negro Digest Magazine in 1961. After a self-imposed exile from the United States, Scott found herself in France, among a galaxy of fellow artists, creating home in another country. “My Paris is a pot full of red beans and rice and an apartment full of old friends and glasses tinkling.”
Like Scott, the chef Mashama Bailey is using food to create a sense of place in her new home in Paris. After running her award-winning restaurant, the Grey, in Savannah, Ga., for more than a decade, Ms. Bailey is crossing the Atlantic and opening her new restaurant, L’Arrêt by the Grey, in one of the world’s most vaunted culinary cities.
Her cooking explores the cuisine of transience and movements, but will her understated, deeply personal approach — so steeped in the foodways of the Black Southern experience — resonate with Parisians?
“This Paris thing is kind of scary. Will the French get the concept of foie gras over grits or will I have to adapt it,” she said in a phone interview, referencing one of her signature dishes at the Grey.
Since 2014, Ms. Bailey and her business partner, John O. Morisano, have told the story of Black Lowcountry cuisine from a former bus terminal, amassing accolades, loyal regulars and lots of press. Declared “reclamation cuisine” in 2017 by Bill Addison, then the restaurant critic at Eater, Ms. Bailey’s cooking has been the focus of an episode of Netflix’s Chef’s Table series and earned her a James Beard award for best chef Southeast in 2019 and outstanding chef in 2022.
For their part, Ms. Bailey and Mr. Morisano describe the Grey’s food as “port city Southern cuisine,” referring to Savannah’s history as a port where enslaved Africans were brought and traded alongside goods like rice and spices.
Consider Ms. Bailey’s signature dish, Country Captain, a rich, braised chicken dish made with currants, curry powder and tomatoes, that deftly speaks to Southern American cuisine while also incorporating ingredients like curry powder that made their way from Asia to the South through trans-Atlantic trade.
It is one of the entrees on the menu at L’Arrêt (the name is a reference to bus stop in French), which opened for dinner service on Sept. 15, after two months of offering only breakfast and lunch.
L’Arrêt is on Paris’s storied Left Bank, in the mostly residential Seventh Arrondissement, occupying a space formerly home to L’Esperance, a longstanding casual bistro that drew many neighborhood regulars. “The neighborhood really influences who we are going to be in Paris,” Mr. Morisano said.
A self-proclaimed Francophile, he approached Ms. Bailey about opening a Paris location of the Grey a few months after the original opened in Savannah in 2014. But it would take more than 10 years for the project to fully form. First he had to get Ms. Bailey on board, and thinking about what story she wanted her cooking to tell in Paris, a challenging proposition when she doesn’t speak the language.
There was also a lengthy legal battle with tenants above the new restaurant who were apprehensive about noisy construction projects, like adding a kitchen ventilation system, that could affect their historic building, as well as the addition of dinner service since the former restaurant was open for only breakfast and lunch.
And then there are the ingredients.
“I’m finding it really difficult,” said Ms. Bailey in June of this year, after two months of testing dishes for the new menu. Cornbread, a dish the chef has perfected in the American South, took a bit more digging and explaining in Paris, she said. “I want cornmeal and our cooks are showing me cornstarch.”
Middlins, the broken rice that is well-known in Southern cooking, was also a hard ingredient to find a match for at Parisian markets, forcing Ms. Bailey to think about what she should bring from her home in Savannah and what she should leave behind. “I thought it’d be a little bit easier,” she said.
L’Arrêt is joining Paris’s dining scene at a moment when Black American soul food is being explored in the city, said Alexander Hurst, a writer and author who has covered Parisian and American dining culture for international publications such as The Guardian. “There’s an appreciation of Black American culture here,” he said, pointing to the success of soul food restaurants like Gumbo Yaya and Mama Jackson Soul Food as evidence of Parisians’ interest in Black American cooking.
Despite not having lived in America, Black Parisian chefs, like Lionel Chauvel-Maga of Gumbo Yaya, are looking to Black American cooking for inspiration.
It’s a poetic reversal of history. In the 18th century, the enslaved African American chef James Hemings was taken to France by Thomas Jefferson to learn French cooking to be replicated in Monticello and the White House.
“I can see the through line,” Ms. Bailey said. Looking into those stories has helped her refine what she wants L’Arrêt to be in relation to the Grey: “a sibling with its own fully formed personality.”
“We’re trying to figure out what we want for Paris and what Paris wants from us,” Mr. Morisano said.
On the décor side, he and the contractors wanted L’Arrêt to be a preservation project instead of a renovation. L’Espérance regulars will recognize the cafe’s wooden chairs in the dining room as well as the marble bar, still standing guard by the door facing Rue de l’Université.
Ms. Bailey is joining a line of Black American women restaurateurs who are bringing their cooking to Paris. In the 1940s, Inez Cavanaugh, a jazz singer and journalist, opened Chez Inez, catering to Americans looking for soul food. In 1990, Alberta Wright opened a Left Bank location of her popular Manhattan restaurant, Jezebel, off the picturesque Boulevard Saint-Germain.
In the kitchen, Ms. Bailey is looking at the legacy of generations of Black cooks before her, and asking how she can make what she wants to cook with what’s available at local markets as well as suppliers.
“I’m going to be asking ‘What can I do from what we have?’ Like Black folks and women often have to do,” she said. “This is Black migration food and I think I can tell a version of my story via Savannah.”
That has required her to rethink some iconic Southern items and whether they make sense at a restaurant thousands of miles across the Atlantic. “I don’t know if I should be able to go to Paris and get a biscuit,” she said. But she can make cornbread or her smoked greens using local, seasonal produce.
And maybe, in that way, she’s getting to the heart of Southern cooking and the ingenuity that pushed it across the ocean from West Africa to America and now, to Europe. “Instead of soft shell crab, I’m going to use langoustines. That makes more sense here.”
“I’m excited to push the narrative of Black food on the move,” she said. And the story doesn’t stop here. “I want young cooks in America to see that.”
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