A short walk from the Louvre, Chez la Vieille guards the corner of Rues Bailleul and l’Arbre Sec, as it has for 56 years. Flowing cursive spells out “Adrienne” along the top of the façade, a reference to its original proprietress, a Corsican woman named Adrienne Biasin, who opened the workaday bistro in 1958 to feed the staff of the nearby Les Halles market. A “sold” sign hangs in the barred windows, and the door is locked.
In Paris, 58 years doesn’t exactly qualify a restaurant as a village elder. But there’s gravity in Adrienne’s closing. And not only its closing, but its upcoming revival at the hands of American restaurateur Stephen Starr, whose deep portfolio of restaurants includes bustling faux-bistros in Philadelphia (Parc), DC (Le Diplomate), and Miami (Le Zoo). Cue the mourners, the angry mobs, and the locals chafing at the greedy appropriation of their culture. Hand-wringers worried, as they have forever: Would this be the latest nail in the coffin of the bistro, Paris’s great institution?
Starr’s partner for the project is Daniel Rose, the chef/owner of the Paris game-changer Spring. And to understand why Rose’s involvement is an appropriate example of what’s going on in Paris now, you have to understand what was going on in Paris a decade ago. When Rose opened Spring in 2005, the restaurant became the poster child of a burgeoning culinary movement, bistronomie. Restaurants that followed this new style were dubbed neo-bistros, “places that take the format of the local, small, corner restaurant and instead of making traditional French food, make food that’s a little more modern and personal,” Rose explains.
Would this be the latest nail in the coffin of the bistro, Paris’s great institution?
“I had been cooking six, seven years in France, but in French that’s like three months, like dog years,” Rose says. “The reaction from the French was very suspicious, like, ‘Oh my God, don’t do that, it’s not possible, you’ll never make money, you’re only 29.’ In the States, 29 is like, ‘Why haven’t you opened a restaurant yet?'”
The original Spring — it moved to its current location, down the street from Chez la Vieille Adrienne, in 2010 — had 16 seats and menu that changed constantly. Reservations were impossible. “Nobody answered the phone, and when someone did answer it was me, trying to do something with my right hand and scratching down a phone number with my left,” Rose says.
Rose did whatever he wanted, opening and closing on a whim within the first year. “I ran to Japan for seven weeks and put a sign on the door that said, ‘See you in April.’ But people liked that authenticity, and it created a following.” And the bistro, that sacred institution, was on notice. Read more
Awesome post! Keep up the great work! 🙂
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