In Hebrew, the word ‘Tekés’ means ceremony, with the implication of a celebration. In Paris, the word now has two meanings–the original Hebrew one, and a second one as the name of Tekés, a very popular new restaurant, which is also a cause for rejoicing, because it has brought modern Israeli vegetarian cooking to a city that’s long been lamentably well-known for its indifference to vegetables.

The long running exception to this generalization has been chef Alain Passard’s shudderingly expensive Michelin three-star restaurant Arpege, but now people who love good food and eat plant-based diets are finally getting a lot more choice in Paris. And many of these new places, including Tekés, are so good that even people who aren’t vegetarian will enjoy eating at them.

Tekés is tucked away in the Sentier, or Paris’s old garment district, which has now become a popular nightlife zone for younger Parisians with lots of bars, cafes and restaurants (Paris-lovers will note that this zone has replaced the superannuated rue de Soif in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, as this once delightful neighborhood has been drained of life by an infestation of identikit luxury brand-name boutiques and expensive pied-a-terre apartments). I liked this warm lively place immediately when I went there to meet a friend there for dinner. It’s run by the same Israeli team led by talented chef Assaf Granit that launched the hugely popular Shabour and Balagan, along with the just-opened Jerusalem street-food restaurant Shosh.

Led by chefs Cécile Levy, who formerly cooked at the Norman Hotel in Tel Aviv, and Dan Yosha, Tekés’s busy open kitchen privileges cooking over charcoal and embers, and it puts on a great show while producing stunningly delicious dishes like grilled zucchini with cinnamon labneh and flambéed eggplant.

The menu leads off with some outstanding breads, including a beautifully fluffy crown-shaped challah for sharing and a buttery sage-leaf garnished galette to tear apart and dip in labneh, and then runs to a suite of Vegan and vegetarian dishes, which are also meant to be shared. These are followed by a regularly evolving roster of Israeli comfort food dishes from different Jewish culinary traditions, which are also meant to be shared, another reason that a meal here ends up being such a good time.

I loved my beet-root chachlik, which came with feta cream and watercress and was every bit as satisfying in terms of taste and texture as any version made with meat, and my friend was delighted by her “The Silk Road,” a dish composed of celeriac, clementine, ginger and shushka. We were also intrigued by the vegetarian chicken liver, which is a composition of mixed mushrooms served with a soft-boiled egg, dates and pine nuts. All of these ingredients arrive table side and are then blended with a mezzaluna before being served. The unguent umami-rich hash actually does have distant echoes of chopped chicken liver, but it’s lighter and fresher than any version made with the fowl. Gnocchi (below) were absolutely delicious, too.

Desserts are intriguing, too, including a brilliant airy mushroom mousse with chocolate granola, a perfect grand finale to the healthy joyous cooking of this very good restaurant.

And walking home after dinner, I couldn’t help but feeling quietly ecstatic that a growing number of talented young chefs are finding ways to create dishes that are not only healthy and environmentally friendly but offer a full flush of gastronomic pleasure as well.

N.B. Tekés has one of the best and most interesting wine lists in Paris, with an especially strong selection of outstanding wines from Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

Tekés, 4bis rue Saint Saveur, 2nd Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 07 81 42 54 74, Metro: Open for dinner only Monday-Saturday. Closed Sunday. Average dinner 45 Euros. http://www.tekesrestaurant.com

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As the months roll by during the second national lockdown of France’s restaurants, I often find myself thinking of chef Mory Sacko and his intriguing restaurant MoSuke. The reason why is that I desperately hope this exceptionally talented young chef’s intriguing restaurant will survive the financial vicissitudes of the greatest crisis to face French gastronomy since World War II, the successive closures imposed by the French government as a way of tamping down the Covid pandemic in France.

This almost all-white dining room with bamboo laminate topped tables, a few bold splashes of color and accessories of colorful African fabric opened in Montparnasse last September, and Sacko was winning rave reviews for his delicate, elegant, and very personal cooking, a fascinating and unique cuisine that reflects his French nationality, the African origins of his immigrant parents and his deep affinity for Japan and Japanese cooking, when he suddenly had to close MoSuke.

“It was very very hard,” he says. “For me, but also for my team, and it’s harder still that we still don’t know when we’ll be able to reopen again,” he told me by phone recently.

To be sure, the very tall (six feet, five inches), lithe and almost preternaturally gracious and poised 28 year old chef, who grew up in the eastern suburbs of Paris with  his eight siblings eating West African dishes like chicken yassa (with lemon and onions), thieboudienne (fried stuffed fish in a tomato-and-vegetable sauce served with rice), and mafé (beef stew in peanut sauce), has hardly been idle in the meantime. Aside from tending to his nearly 200,000 followers on Instagram, he also won a Michelin star in the 2021 guide to France and is the host of a delightful and popular new television show on France 3, Cuisine Ouverte (Open Kitchen) {N.B. This show is in French and you’ll have to create a free account on the France 3 website to watch Sacko live), which debuted on February 28.

The guiding idea of the wryly but accurately named television show is for Sacko to explore the products of the diverse terroirs (specific geographical regions where specific foods are produced according to specific government regulations) of France. The first show was set in Megeve, the tony Alpine resort in the Savoy, and Sacko was a striking screen presence against a backdrop of snowbound mountains. During this show, he met a producer of reblochon, a typically Savoyard cow’s milk cheese, and then a local chef, Emmanuel Renaut, who has three Michelin stars at a the outstanding Les Flocons de Sel. Both chefs then used the cheese to prepare dishes that reflect their style, with Renaut making the hugely lucky Sacko the most sumptuous looking grilled cheese sandwich I’ve ever seen, aka une croûte de montagne. Think sautéed onions, two types of cheese, including Reblochon, and white wine on country bread.

Manioc lacquered with soy sauce, spinach, ginger, coconut

Sacko’s retort was an intricate dish that elegantly expressed the trinity of his gastronomic identity as a Frenchman of African origins who is besotted with Japan. After smoking the reblochon in hay, he liquefied it with sautéed potatoes and onions, added a dab of wasabi, and  siphoned into deep-fried spheres of toasted bread crumbs, which were then perched on sunny yellow pools of beaten egg yolk seasoned with Japanese plum vinegar. Renaut found the dish surprising, but appealing, observing “I was afraid the wasabi would overwhelm the cheese, but it wakes it up.”

This same leitmotif of lyrical but well-reasoned gastronomic invention and iconoclasm was what I found so thrilling when I had dinner at MoSuke with a gastronomically incisive friend last September.

Both of us loved the roasted lobster with facto-fermented peppers, miso and tomato, a sauve and very pretty dish where the miso’s umami teased the sweetness of the lobster and backdropped the gently soured peppers perfectly. This dish was, in fact, a beautiful cameo of where contemporary French cooking is right now–unfailingly elegant in its aesthetics and flawless in terms of its technical skills, but teasingly racy with unexpected flavours and textures and a sort of complicit one-night-stand sexiness.

If I found Sacko’s version of chicken Yassa–chicken with lemon and onions, a signature dish of West Africa, a bit too refined for my tastes, I loved my friend’s sole cooked in a banana leaf with shichimi tōgarashi (a Japanese mix of seven spices) succulent and delicious, as was its accompanying garnish of attiéké, a dish of fermented cassavas pulp popular in the Ivory Coast, garnished with lovage.

And finally, a truly charming dish of marinated pineapple with bissap (hibiscus) sorbet and a candied shiso leaf. This was food unlike anything I’d ever eaten in Paris before, and so I was very curious to chat with the chef at the end of our meal.

When I asked him about his culinary background, he said, “My Mom’s Malian, but she’s also lived in the Ivory Coast and Senegal, so she knows a lot about West African cooking. She’s a great cook, too” he added proudly. After attending hotel school at fifteen, it was while working in the kitchen of chef Hans Zahner at the Royal Monceau hotel in Paris that he first became interested in cooking.

“It was all new for me, because I didn’t have a French grandmother who made boeuf bourguignon every Sunday,” he said with a grin. “We ate African at home and when I went out with friends, it was for fast food. So I learned French cooking through my work, and I have an outsider’s relationship with it. This let’s me be a little irreverent with tradition at the same time that I really respect it,” he added.

When Sacko became sous-chef to Thierry Marx, an ardent Japanophile, at the Michelin two-star restaurant Sur Mesure at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Paris, he discovered the produce and cooking techniques of the Land of the Rising Sun.
“I fell in love with the aesthetics of Japanese cooking, its precision and perfectionism, its cult of the best produce, and its flavors—African and Japanese cooking both prize umami,” Sacko told me. MoSuke, the name of his new restaurant, reflects this passion, too, since it’s an amalgam of his own first name with that of Yasuke, the first and only African samurai, an emancipated Mozambican slave who lived in 16th century Kyoto.

“There’s a big gastronomic romance between France and Japan, because the two countries recognize themselves in each other. I’m sort of the joker in this story, because I approach both of these kitchens as an outsider, and with my knowledge of African cooking and ingredients, I can shake things up and frame their flavours differently,” says Sacko.

Suffice it to say that I am very much looking forward to dining at MoSuke again and that it should be on your go-to list as well for your next trip to Paris, which will hopefully be very very soon.

11 rue Raymond Losserand, 14th Arrondissement, Paris, Tel. (33) 01 43 20 21 39, Metro: Montparnasse-Vaugirard or Gaite. Open Wednesday-Sunday for lunch and dinner. Closed Monday and Tuesday. Average 60 Euros. www.mosuke-restaurant.com

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Through a succession of different owners and chefs, Chardenoux, now known as Le Chardenoux, has been part of my life in Paris for thirty years. Now this storied old bistro has been rebooted as a fashion-forward restaurant redesigned and redecorated to attract a trendy crowd of younger Parisians. For all intents and purposes, it’s basically become an entirely new restaurant.

This is actually the second revision of this address within the past five years, since chef Cyril Lignac gave it a freshening up and added a fleet of contemporary French dishes to the traditional menu of bistro classics when he originally took it over in 2014. You can read what I thought about this first reboot of what had always been one of my favorite Paris restaurants here: CHARDENOUX, Paris-An Eternally Charming Bistro, B+

On my way to dinner at the new version of Le Chardenoux, I found myself thinking about how restaurants can offer a very intimate reflection of larger changes in the life of any city. My short take on the reset of this restaurant was that the 11th Arrondissement has gentrified so much that the previous version of Le Chardenoux probably wasn’t doing the business that Lignac wanted anymore, and so he decided to completely pivot away from the bistro formula towards a fashion-driven table that would appeal to twenty-and-thirty something Parisians. This tribe isn’t especially attracted to traditional bistro cooking, which explains the new seafood centered menu, which also has a burger and sate chicken for non fish eaters. In their eyes, the Belle Epoque style of the restaurant’s dining room probably also reads more as just plain old rather than charming, hence the new decor by trendy London based interior designer Martin Brudnizki.

Even before Brudnizki got to work, this was already one of the prettiest restaurants in Paris, with a big zinc bar just inside the front door and beautiful and very delicate Belle Epoque floral moulding on the ceiling. Happily, these elements have survived some rather radical Miami Beach style cosmetic surgery, but the serene elegance of the decor has given way to a decor that’s meant to look good in Instagrams. Brudnizki filled the previously empty ceiling medallions with busy murals of trees branches and also added some ornate not correctly scaled Baroque chandeliers and a patterned floor that replaced the original workaday tile. He also added some plump ribbed oversized velvet banquettes and a dimmer switch or two to create a sort of louche lounge atmosphere in the evening. If you didn’t know the restaurant before, it’s pretty. If you did, it’s sort of like Charlotte Rampling has morphed into Kim Kardashian.

Cyril Lignac is a consummate culinary professional, so the food here is good. The menu is divided between three subheads–Shellfish & Crustaceans, Raw & Marinated and Sea & Land, along with a short selection of desserts. Coming for dinner with Bruno, we began with Utah Beach oysters served with small chipolata sausages–a delicious combination, like they do in Bordeaux for me and sea bass carpaccio with olive oil, lemon juice and pink pepper corns for Bruno. Both dishes were well-prepared and attractively presented, but I also couldn’t help but thinking that the new menu requires a lot less cooking time and culinary effort than the one it replaced. In other words, these are simple, high turnover items that an only marginally trained kitchen staffer could easily be trained to make. The bottomline, of course, is that more elaborate cooking is time-consuming, and so expensive.

Judging from the crowd in the dining room, Martin Brudnizki’s decor as bait is having the desired effect. The other diners were young, and there were a lot of logo designer handbags in evidence, which created a see-and-be-seen  atmosphere more like what you find at the Hotel Costes dining room or similarly trendy Paris restaurants such as Monsieur Bleu or Le Girafe than a bistro. Since night clubs have almost become extinct in Paris, restaurants have filled the gap as the main venue for socializing among the city’s bright young things.

My langoustine ravioli with cabbage in a spiced bouillon was pleasant as a main course, as was Bruno’s salmon in Thai (lemongrass and lime leaves) bouillon with cockles. Again, both dishes were nicely prepared and plated, and shrewdly conceived to appeal to the new demographic the restaurant is courting. Other options included a lobster roll, which look rather skimpy on a neighboring table for 27 Euros, deep-fried strips of sole with aubergine tempura, sea bass baked in a crust of salt for two at an eye-watering 90 Euros, and scallops with Jerusalem artichokes, black truffles and dark rum.

The dessert not to miss is the excellent vanilla-cream-filled praline-pecan millefeuille, which is made in Lignac’s very good patisserie just across the street.

The new Le Chardenoux is a pleasant restaurant, which is usefully open daily, but I still felt slightly wistful at the end of my meal here. Why These days I can get a lobster roll at lots of other places in Paris, but it’s increasingly difficult to find a dish like the beautifully made navarin d’agneau I ate the last time I came here. Economic globalization is getting some blowback these days, but food trends have never been more international.

All photos by Thomas Dhellemmes

1 rue Jules Vallès, 11th Arrondissement, Tel. (33) 01-43-71-49-52. Metro: Charonne or Faideherbe-Chaligny. Open daily for lunch and dinner. www.restaurantlechardenoux.com. Average a la carte 60 Euros  www.restaurantlechardenoux.com

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