Work-wear coats and aprons in traditional French blues, colorful sneakers, and expat-chic neckerchiefs: We come to Brooklyn’s Sauvage for the smoked corn tagliatelle, but we stay for the fashion inspiration.
From the team behind classic Brooklyn oyster bar Maison Premiere, Sauvage follows a different narrative. "It's not so precise," says owner Joshua Boissy. "Sauvage is a little more free-flowing and a little bit more diverse in terms of the influences." The name itself translates aptly to “wild and natural.”
The bartenders don workwear coats—custom-designed by the Savauge team and manufactured in Brooklyn—inspired by student advocates at the front lines of a radical leftist revolution in 1960s France. France was stable, the economy bolstered, and President Charles de Gaulle a beloved ruler. But just below the surface seethed masses of frustrated students, fed up with draconian education systems and a scarcity of employment.
"A lot of people consider the 1968 French revolution to be just as much a social revolution as it was a political one," says Boissy, who conceptualized the uniforms. "The students who took part in all of this, they all had this kind of, you know, anti-establishment, anti-capitalistic kind of view," he says. "We thought having these coats as part of our uniforms was an interesting nod to that time—the attitude, the mindset."
The s-shaped, brass-trimmed bar is the perfect vantage point to take in the different iterations of Sauvage’s dapper crew while sipping a cold Sancerre. The male bartenders wear crayon-red Vans, skinny acid-wash jeans from H&M, and pastel shirts. The women: Elizabeth Arden coral lipstick and a classic bun.
Managers float around in colorful sundresses, while backwaiters and baristas wear blue kitchen aprons, Oxford button ups from H&M, and, of course, colorful custom neckerchiefs. "The coat itself seemed a little flat, you know. It just didn't seem energetic enough,” says Boissy. "I wanted Sauvage to also feel like maybe you're on vacation in the French Riviera.”
The uniforms are just one part of Sauvage’s retro-meets-radical-meets-farm-to-table pastiche: the wines are unfiltered, the music is an eclectic '70s mixtape, and, when in season, the produce is bought from farms as close to home as possible. "We didn't want to build a restaurant that was like an old time-machine,” says Boissy. "Instead, here we are, thousands of miles away, inspired by this small French movement that speaks to us.”