Half Moroccan riad, half New York loft: the “Bloom Garden” restaurant behind Paris’ Gare de l’Est is one of the top addresses for faubourgeoise cuisine.
Image: Klaus Simon
Paris beyond the big restaurant theater: In the suburbs of the French capital, a culinary art that is as unusual as it is exciting has developed. She caused a sensation as La Cuisine faubourgeoise.
Dhe black gothic blow-dry hairstyle with which Olivier Streiff won over a French audience of millions in the sixth season of the television cooking show “Top Chef” is a thing of the past. Nine years after the Lorraine native cooked his way to the semi-finals under the strict eyes of star chefs Hélène Darroze and Philippe Etchebest, Streiff wears a very Parisian Hercule Poirot mustache. It is fitting that last September the great eccentric among France's chefs accepted the position of chef de cuisine in the “Bloom Garden”, the restaurant of the Bloom House Hotel behind the Gare de l'Est, which looks like a daring mixture of a shared living room , New York loft and Moroccan riad.
“The east of Paris means opening,” Streiff explains his decision to go to the French capital after stops on the Côte d'Azur and Burgundy. Not so long ago, the location of the Bloom House Hotel in the Faubourg Saint-Martin would have deterred both restaurant visitors and hotel guests, not to mention investors. Less than a ten-minute walk separates the design hotel, tailored to the Urban Traveler International, from the Métro elevated train line 2, under whose viaducts homeless people spread out their cardboard documents every evening. A little further along the Canal Saint-Martin, the bare concrete walls of an abandoned grit warehouse are sprayed with graffiti. And from a fire brigade barracks, bright red ambulances with big tattoos roll out.
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