“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.
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The post Can One of America’s Great Black Chefs Flourish in Paris? appeared first on New York Times.
