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Printemps Is French. Its Food Speaks Creole.
Photo: Lanna Apisukh/B) Lanna Apisukh
When the Parisian department-store chain Printemps opens its new Manhattan store this month at 1 Wall Street, it will offer — among the vintage Yves Saint Laurent and La Rosée cosmétiques — something that its many French stores do not: five spots to eat and drink run by Gregory Gourdet. It’s a homecoming for the Queens-raised chef, whose career took off in Portland, Oregon, and who achieved national fame on Top Chef. Devising so many menus at once would be a daunting task for any chef, and Gourdet had another predicament he wanted to work out: “I know that New York doesn’t need another French restaurant,” he concedes.
Gourdet, in partnership with Kent Hospitality Group, is overseeing everything as the culinary director at the Red Room Bar, Salon Vert, Café Jalu, a fine-dining spot called Maison Passerelle, and the Champagne Bar, which will just offer drinks. He says the food will be “French, but through the lens of all its former colonies,” drawing especially on Gourdet’s Haitian background as much as the store’s own French history. For the chef, that means pastries with Haitian chocolate, lemongrass and coconut mixed into the tomato soup, lime for oeufs mayo, raw oysters with epis mignonette, and akara. In his Creole cassoulet, for example, he’s subbing out cannellini beans for black-eyed peas, seasoning the mix with Creole spices, adding smoked sausage from Oregon’s Olympia Provisions, and slow-cooking chicken legs in duck fat. As Gourdet explains, his recipe takes all the traditional steps of cassoulet, but with ingredients more specific to Haiti and Louisiana, where many Haitians migrated during and after the Haitian Revolution.
Photo: Lanna Apisukh
That will be served at Maison Passerelle, which will open after the gas is turned on. There will be plenty to feed hungry shoppers in the meantime. Pastries and more are found at Café Jalu, which also serves fresh juices, Haitian hot chocolate made with coconut milk, coffee and tea, and both éclairs and curry hand pies. The white-walled design here might evoke Sue’s workout show from The Substance, while the upstairs raw bar, Salon Vert, is more Gilded Age, with hanging light fixtures that look like pink Christmas trees, an enclosed area meant to look like a giant birdcage, and paintings of slightly alien-looking foliage on the wall. The food here — mussels escabeche, French sardines with plantain chips, and caviar service — will be more familiar to New York shoppers, while the menu at the Red Room Bar (part of a landmarked space) features crisp green plantains and a Haitian tarte à l’oignon, which Gourdet describes as a “very eggy” custard set with Edam cheese and loads of caramelized onion. “It’s something my mom made often, not super often, but it was just one of those iconic dishes from our childhood that was more of a special occasion dish,” he says. “You can get quiche pretty much anywhere in New York City. I don’t know anywhere where you can get a Haitian onion pie in New York City.”
The restaurants and bars will be scattered across the two-story space, which Printemps brass — as well as ads plastered across the city — stress is not a department store, since the retail is all mixed together across 55,000 square feet. Gourdet’s cooking is meant to be as much of a draw as the clothes. “We were coming out of the pandemic. Everybody had been shopping online,” says Laura Lendrum, the CEO of Printemps USA. They envisioned this as “a hospitality project” instead of a traditional boutique. “I do think that people might come for dinner before they discover what Printemps is and the rest of the project,” she says.
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