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Toward the end of your meal at 19 Saint Roch, a relatively new Parisian restaurant in the 1st arrondissement, a block from the Tuileries, do me a favor and order the île flottante (floating island). It may be the best île flottante you’ve ever had. The meringue, a perfect cube rather than the usual mound, comes decorated with sesame praline on a layer of custard sprinkled with, among other things, smoked chile béarnaise. It’s a delight to behold and to eat.
Dessert, which followed a starter of raw line-caught grouper with cherries and walnuts, and duck with bell pepper au jus and giblet salad when I visited, is one of the standout creations of chef Pierre Touitou, who is probably best known for running the kitchen at the lively natural wine bar. Living and his little brother Deflected in the 10th. The kitchen in 19 San Roque It is “less brutalist and blunt” than anything found at the previous locations. The île flottante (“a fantastic classic dessert that uses very few ingredients”) exemplifies their new approach: simplicity and refinement with variations on traditional French style.
You could say that these are family concerns. Touitou’s father is Jean Touitou, founder of the Parisian clothing company Armored vehicleknown for her minimalist Gallic designs. As for style: “Like father, like son,” says Touitou. “I’ve always liked clean lines.”
When we meet, the six-foot-tall, broad-shouldered 31-year-old is dressed in a white chef’s suit and a smart pair of oxblood-coloured clogs from the Danish brand SanitaBut even outside the kitchen, he prefers a strict uniform: blue, white or striped. Brooks Brothers Shirts (instead of APC’s more fitted shirts), tank tops from Fruit of the Loom and suede boots from the Camargue-based shoe brand. The Guardian Bottle“I started wearing their boots 10 years ago,” he tells me. “I now have six pairs. I like them for the same reason I like my clothes. They’re simple. I don’t have to think about what shoes to wear because I wear boots every day. I don’t have to tie my laces. I don’t even have to think about socks because the boots hide them.” He compares it to working from a menu of insoles or a start-up As a chef: “Not having to think about those things allows you to be more spontaneous in everything you do.”
His mother, Agnes Chemetoff, an artistic director, worked on the visual side of APC, among other brands. But Touitou was never interested in following in his parents’ footsteps into fashion or design: “I don’t think my father or mother ever wanted me to work with them or have the burden of running anything,” he says. Instead, he loved to eat as a child and fell in love with restaurants (“When I was five or six, I remember drawing a house with its own restaurant.”) As a chef, he started out as a teenage apprentice at Alain Ducasse’s Plaza Athénée before working at Sketch by Pierre Gagnaire in London and Le Servan in Paris, among other places.
His menus at 19 Saint Roch are rooted in French cuisine, but influences range from the Mediterranean to the Far East, with ingredients like bottarga and miso and techniques like cooking in vinegar. His signature appetizer, lo bak go, are Chinese turnip cakes inspired by dim sum but styled similarly to panisse (chickpea fritters). “The cooking I do here doesn’t need labels,” he says. “When people ask me, I usually say, ‘I try to make good food.’” The global lexicon, however, speaks to his extensive travels and family heritage.
“My parents travelled to Japan a lot for work. As a child, I probably ate as much Japanese food as I did French food,” he says. “My mother is half Russian, half Norman, so we ate a lot of haddock with potatoes and crème fraîche. And my father is Tunisian Jewish, so meatballs in tomato sauce with couscous was a family favourite.”
From her paternal grandmother, she inherited a love of traditional Tunisian dishes such as klaya (stewed meat), nikitouche (chicken soup) and mloukhya (a stew of meat and jute leaves). When she passed away, her recipes were collected in a book; on the cover was her name, Odette Touitou, followed by “AF2701”, the Air France flight from Tunis that took the family to Paris in the 1950s.
“It’s not a traditional cookbook,” Touitou says of the volume, which includes a chapter on family memories of her great-grandfather and the German occupation of Tunisia. “Most of the recipes start the same way: ‘In a large pot, add a drop of olive oil…’ My favorite is a recipe for fennel salad, which consists of a couple of lines: Slice the fennel. Add lemon juice and pepper. Make it an hour before serving.” That love of simplicity runs in the family.