French Restaurant Near Irish Arts Center Long Island City
Harlem's French Renaissance
A small Francophile customs, lured past Harlem's sense of community and storied history, has sprung up, and along with it have come French restaurants.
Chéri is on a handsome stretch of Malcolm X Boulevard, between West 121st and Westward 122nd Street. The owner operated a restaurant in Paris for twenty years earlier moving to New York. Credit... Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Harlem has long had a romance with French republic. Well earlier the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, African-American artists and musicians traveled to France to augment their artistic vision or to escape the daily oppression of American racism.
Not widely known, still, is that the traffic went both ways, with French tourists visiting Harlem because of their fascination with jazz, gospel and black culture, even through the rough years of the 1970s and 1980s, when fear of crime kept abroad many Americans. During that era, my French came in handy more than once, giving directions to bewildered visitors.
French-speaking Africans have settled and opened businesses on and around West 116th Street since the 1980s, with Petit Senegal lending the bustling thoroughfare a distinctly international air with passers-past in flowing boubous, shops selling phone cards for cheap calls to Africa, and Franco-African restaurants and vegetable stands offering tropical products similar hot peppers, plantain and palm oil. But since the 1990s, a minor French expat community, attracted past the romanticism of Harlem, its potent sense of customs and colorful history, as well as past comparatively lower real estate prices, has sprung up, and, inevitably, so have French restaurants.
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Several restaurants are clustered around West 125th Street and Malcolm 10 Boulevard (still chosen Lenox Artery by hard-cadre Harlemites), and however the chirapsia center of Harlem, with one outlier on a corner of St. Nicholas Avenue that once hosted an unmemorable Chinese restaurant. As a Haitian-born immigrant who lived in Paris, Africa and for decades on Manhattan's Upper West Side before returning to Paris five years ago, I detect the knowledge that I can eat a decent French meal on my trips back to New York — without traveling downtown — equally comforting as a blanquette de veau on a crisp Paris evening.
The presence of at least four traditional French restaurants in Harlem suggests in many ways how much Harlem has evolved, this neighborhood that has absorbed successive waves of immigrants, including the 17th-century Dutch farmers who named it after Haarlem back home. Then in that location were the Irish gaelic and Italians of the mid-19th century, and at the start of the 20th century, Jewish entrepreneurs and entertainers and African-Americans fleeing the segregated South. Now affluent millennials, including many whites, priced out of other parts of the metropolis, have arrived.
Harlem's embrace of the French restaurateurs has been warm. "Harlem is a village," said Thierry Guizonne, the owner of Chez Lucienne. Increasingly, the village has a French emphasis.
For most of the 1950s and 1960s, the virtually visible Gallic presence in Harlem was Frenchy, the flamboyant Haitian-built-in Camillo Casimir, whose Casdulan Hairdressers on 125th Street was Harlem'south largest beauty parlor. Frenchy traveled oftentimes to Paris to keep up with the latest styles and coifed the hair of Harlem V.I.P.'due south, including Diahann Carroll and Mrs. Louis Armstrong.
Today, in the rapidly gentrifying landscape that is Harlem, the French presence is best seen in four restaurants, in addition to African-owned places with classic French dishes on their menus alongside African specialties, including Patisserie des Ambassades on Frederick Douglass Boulevard and W 119th Street; Ponty Bistro Harlem on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard at West 139th Street; and takeout sandwich shops like B & K French Cuisine on Adam Clayton Powell at West 128th.
Paradigm
Harlem, long known as the uppercase of black America, has a history equally a culinary destination, primarily for soul food at longtime establishments such every bit Sylvia'southward on Malcolm Ten Boulevard nearly W 126th Street and Amy Ruth's on W 116th Street. On many evenings, busloads of European and Asian tourists tin can exist seen jostling with the locals for an authentic feel of Southern cuisine. Long gone are Wells Supper Club, which allowed tardily-night revelers to have dinner and breakfast at the same fourth dimension with its famous fried chicken and waffles, and Copeland's, which offered chitterlings and champagne in Hamilton Heights and briefly on the Upper West Side earlier foundering in 2007.
While the majority of the media attention to Harlem's growing restaurant scene has lately gone to the celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson and his Red Rooster Harlem, launched in 2010 on Malcolm X Boulevard, with an eclectic mix of Scandinavian and soul nutrient (both Swedish meatballs and fried craven are on the carte du jour), information technology's no longer difficult to find a decent coq au vin, a confit de canard or a boeuf bourguignon northward of W 110th Street.
Each of the four restaurants profiled here offers its own detail ambient.
Barawine Harlem
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There are no berets or other French clichés in sight at Barawine Harlem, on a corner of Malcolm X Boulevard at West 120th Street. Owned past Fabrice Warin, the restaurant and vino bar, with its subtle gray and chocolate-brown color scheme, rows of wine bottles and subdued lighting, would fit correct in with the new wave of cool branché (plugged-in) bistros in the 10th Arrondissement around the Canal St. Martin. A long 2-sided rectangular bar that doubles as a communal table takes up much of the space in the blusterous front end of the house. Customers sit adjacent or across from one another. Those who prefer conventional tables and larger groups can find them in the back room, or, in skilful weather, on the sidewalk.
Mr. Warin (pronounced Vah-RHIN), born in Bordeaux, starting time moved to Commonwealth of australia, where he learned English, before finding his fashion to New York. He got a task as a waiter, studied to become a sommelier and worked for Alain Ducasse and François Payard before launching his ain place.
Mr. Warin, 44, has lived in Harlem since 2000 and had long dreamed of opening a French eating place in that location. "I have a passion for food and vino and Harlem," he said. Only some investors remained wary of financing restaurants in the neighborhood until Mr. Samuelsson's Cerise Rooster opened a decade ago, he said. Gaetan Rousseau, a film producer and former neighbor in Harlem who had ofttimes heard his pitch, finally agreed to invest. Barawine is a Franglais discussion play on the French bar à vin.
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Open since August 2013 for dinner daily and brunch on weekends, Barawine attracts a stylish and diverse crowd of young and sometime, black and white, neighborhood characters, tourists looking for a good meal and suburbanites who want to experience the "new Harlem." "We have a lot of French people on the weekend," Mr. Warin said, attributing the surge of European tourists in the last five years to an article in the French newspaper Le Figaro almost black churches offering gospel music.
The ambience at Barawine is absurd and upscale, with a D.J. spinning rap, hip-hop and soul at Sunday brunch, and live jazz on Sunday nights and Tuesdays. A multiracial Francophone staff offers friendly and efficient service. Barawine features a standard French carte, including mussels, a charcuterie plate and hand-cutting beef tartare. The food is tasty, well presented and reminds me of the bistronomique restaurants in the gentrifying neighborhoods of the 10th and 11th Arrondissements in Paris. The list is international, with 25 wines available past the drinking glass at $ix to $15, and 200 wines available by the bottle. At dinner, first courses range from $10 to $16; main dishes, $17 to $36.
Chez Lucienne
Prototype
Just a few blocks due north, on Malcolm X Boulevard between West 125th and 126th Streets, is the grand-mère of them all, Chez Lucienne, which opened at the stop of 2008, two years before the Red Rooster arrived next door. Operated then past the French restaurateur Alain Chevreux and named for his mother, Chez Lucienne changed hands in 2015. The owner is now Thierry Guizonne, 40, a native of the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, who had run a sushi restaurant in the Paris suburb of Rueil-Malmaison before moving to New York in 2014.
Mr. Guizonne (pronounced Gee-ZONE) said many customers — unaware of France's increasingly diverse population — are surprised to meet a black Frenchman as the possessor. Explaining his origins tin can exist difficult since, he said, nearly customers have never heard of Guadeloupe. "I tell them it's near St. Martin," he said, referring to the pop Caribbean vacation destination.
Mr. Guizonne said he benefits from the cartoon power of the media-consuming Ruby Rooster just next door. "I like to say people political party at Red Rooster, but they come to my place to consume."
His carte du jour features many French classics, including, on a contempo visit, an onion soup, a steak-frites and a cassoulet on a par with what I order in a standard neighborhood eating house in my Paris neighborhood. At dinner, first courses are $8 to $sixteen; primary courses, $20 to $28. The atmosphere is vaguely colonial and a fiddling faded, with exposed bricks, overhead fans, palms and a row of antique mirrors forth one wall. Mr. Guizonne has plans for an upgrade of the décor, and has opened an upstairs lounge with jazz and R&B music for dancing on weekends. He's likewise considering a new name. In good weather, his outdoor seating area is lively and ideal for checking out the boldface names going in and out of the Ruby Rooster.
Chéri
Chéri casts a different spell. In the middle of the block between West 121st and 122nd Streets on Malcolm 10 Boulevard, it is tucked into a row of finely detailed brownstones, most with street-level commercial space, in a section of the boulevard that best displays the grandeur of sometime Harlem. Because churches and rowhouses boss this role of Malcolm X instead of the monotonous high-rises farther north, the spaciousness of the thoroughfare tin can be fully appreciated here for its generous width and broad sidewalks.
Paradigm
Chéri is a couple of steps down from the sidewalk on the ground floor of a brownstone, and the temper is both casual and refined.
"I wanted people to feel they are in my living room," said Alain Eoche, 57, an energetic human who lives on 2 floors above the restaurant. He is a believer in the Chinese do of feng shui and has organized and busy the infinite himself. There's a g piano, a bar along the left side of the room, a bookcase and a fireplace.
The jewel of the location is the garden in the back, a covered space that can exist opened to the sky in good weather. Chéri frequently features live music — a pianist most evenings, with a singer on occasion. The walls serve as a gallery for a rotating roster of French and Caribbean artists whom Mr. Eoche admires.
Epitome
Born in Nantes, on the Atlantic declension of French republic, Mr. Eoche (pronounced AY-osh)endemic a restaurant in the chic Marais district of Paris for 20 years before moving to New York in 2013. He opened Chéri in March 2014. The card includes a merguez lamb burger, and something difficult to find in French republic, a veggie burger. Offset courses are $ix to $21; main dishes, $19 to $27. Mr. Eoche does much of the cooking himself, including the daily special, and the nutrient benefits from his personal attending — it is authentic and flavorful.
Like the other three restaurateurs, he fell in love with Harlem's neighborliness. "Y'all're in New York, but not really," he said. "The hamlet ambient makes immigrants feel more at ease."
Maison Harlem
Paradigm
Maison Harlem is several blocks w of the French cluster of restaurants around Malcolm X Boulevard and West 125th Street. On a corner of Westward 127th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, information technology draws a more economically diverse oversupply than the other three spots, from working-class African-Americans and Latinos to smartly dressed strivers and gentrifiers, all in a warm atmosphere that recalls a neighborhood bistro in a gritty section of Paris, like Belleville in the 20th Arrondissement.
The groundwork is exposed brick, and the décor smacks more of accumulation than foresight — a gumball machine, an antique clock and assorted paintings. The bar, on the footing level of what used to be a Chinese restaurant, is lighted by alpine windows during the day and is warm and cozy in the evening. Information technology is the center of social interaction at Maison Harlem, with drinkers elbow to elbow on decorated weekend nights and the overflow and those waiting for tables lined up along the narrow counter on the opposite wall.
The large dining room is several steps up at the back of the bar, giving diners the sensation of stepping onto a stage. Y'all have a choice of picking a table or a leather booth to monitor the bar scene or seats further back for more privacy.
Maison Harlem is nestled at the foot of the hill that leads to the City College campus and its hodgepodge of granite and white terra-cotta neo-Gothic buildings and stark modern structures. It draws a busy lunch crowd during the week, college faculty, students and employees of businesses around West 125th Street.
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The owner, Samuel Thiam, 45, is a native of Paris who grew upwardly in the southern French city of Montpellier. An aunt and uncle ran a restaurant in the Paris suburbs. Mr. Thiam (pronounced TEA-am) came to New York equally a dancer and player, but a motorcycle blow concluded that career. He got work equally a flooring director for television news shows. The hours were long, he recalled, and the job didn't fulfill him.
The restaurant, now 4 years former, was a response to a personal demand. "I had a condo in Harlem and no bistros to hang out for a glass of wine," Mr. Thiam said. He found a business organization partner to finance the bargain when a corner store became available. Reflecting a French — and New York — reality, location was important. "You have to have a corner," he said. He has also opened a wine store directly across the street.
The menu and the ambient repeat his biracial origins — his female parent was from Normandy and his father from the Ivory Declension. "I wanted to take French food with an African brio," Mr. Thiam said. The background music leans toward Afrobeat and the Nigerian music fable Fela Kuti, but you lot might hear French chansons at luncheon and brunch. There are North African dishes, including a merguez sausage sandwich at lunch. First courses at dinner are $9 to $twenty; master courses, $xiv to $32. He recently introduced a bar carte that offers sliders and oysters at a buck a slice.
Mr. Thiam has been struck by how both old and new Harlemites are remarkably knowledgeable about French cuisine. "I've had so many people chatting with me most escargots, foie gras and pâtés, it always surprises me," he said.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/travel/harlem-french-renaissance-new-york-city-restaurants-food.html
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