French Restaurants Are in Vogue

Tucked in a quiet side street, in the buzzy Sentier neighborhood of Paris’s 2nd arrondissement, you’ll find chic little boutique Halo. Constructed in 1750, the building has had a series of unlikely tenants and owners — the upscale Hôtel Osmond brothel, the Vatican, a leather atelier — before Victor Goyeneix and Matthieu Nicolaï opened the current shop in 2023. The space hosts a revolving roster of young designers, and as you enter, a photographer might be busy snapping shots of a model wearing the latest brand. Make your way across the pistachio-green carpet, slip into one of the changing rooms, push aside the back panel, and find a dining room under a glass roof, along with a staircase descending to a club and private dining room.

The other half of Halo, tucked behind the storefront, is a restaurant headed up by Victor Blanchet. Past the brown leather banquettes, through a window in a deep-green, Guatemala marble wall, the achingly fashionable chef can be seen sprinkling seafood-centric dishes with purple flowers and grilled herbs. Nearby, a designer works away at a sewing machine, drawing inspiration for their latest collection from the shared space.

This is not a restaurant with an ill-planned shopping concept tacked on. Nor is it a boutique with a meager speakeasy shoved underneath.

“We didn’t want to do things half-heartedly,” says cofounder Victor Goyeneix. “Halo is a fully fledged restaurant headed up by a proper, talented chef.”

The operation is the natural crossing of creative paths. Goyeneix and Nicolaï, who grew up in creative households (their mothers were a ceramics artist in the Basque Country and a concept store owner in Marseille, respectively), found a kindred soul in phenom Blanchet, who was adopted by French parents from Haiti as a toddler and started working in kitchens at 14, before notching time at three-Michelin-starred L’Arpège, one-starred Neso, and the latest season of French Top Chef.

“The founders’ youth appealed to me,” says Blanchet, his tattooed arms covered by crisp, branded kitchen whites, “but it was the combination of fashion and food that truly captivated me.”

Though this combination of personalities, space, and French Mediterranean and Basque cuisines may seem unlikely, Halo makes perfect sense in Paris, where fashion and food are sanctified industries. The last few years have seen a number of designers leaving fashion to open restaurants, restaurateurs looking to fashion brands to generate business, and hybrid stores like Halo blurring the boundaries entirely.

“Restaurants have become another element of fashion,” Goyeneix says. “It’s not just about a trend or a marketing ploy, but about art, design, and that human connection.”

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Fashion folks have been ambassadors for particular restaurants over the decades, driving business with every paparazzi photo. Café de Flore, an 1880s cafe that’s among the city’s most iconic, became a stomping ground in the ’60s for Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent’s coterie. Fans of designer Azzedine Alaïa would rush to Chez Omar, opened in the Marais in 1979, hoping to bump into him, and the couscous restaurant remains on the fashion circuit after his death. Goyeneix points to designers like Olivier Rousteing and Simon Porte Jacquemus, who draw fans to certain spots today through social media in a similar way.

But some fashion moguls have made the leap from customers to full-time owners. They’re inspired, in part, by extra exposure for their brands. Chefs have become influencers in their own right, making them strong allies for the right designer or model.

“They don’t just want a good caterer, as it might have been the case before, but a proper chef whose image is in line with their image,” says artist Romain Joste, cofounder of the Broken Arm boutique and former cafe.

In the last few years, especially since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, young, fashionable folks have also become more thoughtful about their lifestyles, to some extent shifting away from partying at Parisian clubs in favor of decent meals at earlier hours. It’s become imperative for fashion brands and influencers to truly invest their money and attention in quality cooking.

In the past, Goyeneix says, there was a stigma against fashion-forward restaurants; everyone assumed the food would be terrible. “But that’s a thing of the past,” he adds. Neo-bistros like Septime have become perennial favorites during Paris Fashion Week, as have spots like Folderol, an afternoon favorite among an influencer audience for natural wine and scoops of silky ice cream.

“Now food is fashion and fashion finally loves food,” says Lucien Pagès, founder of the eponymous Parisian fashion and lifestyle PR and communications agency.

When Joste and fashion vets Anaïs Lafarge and Guillaume Steinmetz established the Broken Arm in 2012 — which included a cafe offering soups, sandwiches, and meat and cheese plates — they didn’t intend to kickstart a generation of food-fashion hybrids. Their goal was simpler.

“The Broken Arm is about combining and sharing what we love,” Joste says.

This idea isn’t limited to Paris. Not long after the Broken Arm set up shop, lifestyle brand Kitsuné, created in 2002 by Gildas Loaëc and Masaya Kuroki, launched its first Café Kitsuné to go along with its music and fashion labels. Today the brand has an impressive 26 Café Kitsunes worldwide from Tokyo to Vancouver.

But the crossover is at its best in the fashion capital of the world, where major houses can pour money into Michelin-worthy restaurants. When François-Henri Pinault, CEO of luxury conglomerate Kering (Gucci, Saint Laurent, and Balenciaga), opened his art foundation at the city’s old stock exchange, the Bourse de Commerce, he called upon father-and-son chefs Sébastien and Michel Bras, known for their three-Michelin-starred Le Suquet. LVMH (Christian Dior, Loewe, Fendi) also folded high-end restaurants into its portfolio at its hotels, including the Cheval Blanc hotel in Paris, where it tapped chefs like Arnaud Donckele for three-Michelin-starred Plénitude and Takuya Watanabe for Hakuba.

For some fashion industry workers, a restaurant offers a natural escape from design without leaving the orbit entirely. Lorenza Lenzi spent several years at Chloé as personal assistant to the art director, and she would bake at Rose Bakery in her spare time. She eventually left to start her own catering service, a small cafe, and eventually restaurants Caché (Mediterranean) and Amagat (Catalan tapas). The two beautiful venues, hidden inside an old printing atelier in an out-of-the-way alleyway of the 20th arrondissement, are now hot spots.

Caché

But for others, a restaurant isn’t a departure at all, but an extension of their existing brand. The Broken Arm cafe was “a way for us to make that shared experience last a bit longer than browsing the items in our store, especially for people who come from far away, like Japan, to visit us,” Joste says. “We wanted to give them something more.”

Fashion designer Ralph Lauren’s restaurant, Ralph’s, functions similarly at his Paris flagship store in Saint-Germain. Opened in 2010, it’s popular among shoppers for its picturesque courtyard seating. But it also fits within Lauren’s overall vision, blending classic American dishes — lobster rolls, juicy burgers — with Parisian elegance in a 17th-century townhouse.

Thierry Gillier, founder of French fashion brand Zadig et Voltaire, offers the full lifestyle treatment at Château Voltaire, his 2022 foray into hotels near Opéra. The property isn’t just a chance for tourists to engage with the high-end brand; the 32-room hotel caters to locals, too (a necessity for any business opening during the COVID-19 pandemic) with a restaurant that serves decent food, made from well-sourced ingredients, at accessible prices.

Naturally, the hotel’s restaurant, Brasserie Emil, is usually seething with patrons decked out in supple pantsuits and leather miniskirts, feasting on red tuna tartare with avocado and ponzu sauce, Milanese escalope, and other Mediterranean-esque dishes.

“The fashion industry loves Château Voltaire because it is chic and low key,” explains Pagès, whose agency represents the hotel. “You can see lots of main actors of the industry there, but it’s not pretentious. It is of excellent taste, with an easiness that the fashion crowd appreciates.”

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Collaborating with a fashion operation can be a huge moneymaker for chefs and restaurateurs.

“We thought the restaurant would be our main breadwinner, but hosting fashion events at the restaurant is what generates the most revenue,” Goyeneix explains. “Fashion brings an edge, which draws a certain level of tastemakers, which goes a long way to extending our circle and getting the restaurant known.”

But such a setup also makes restaurants vulnerable to the shifting whims of the fashion industry. In 2022, the Broken Arm co-founders decided to downsize the cafe space to make room for art, magazines, and books. They brought in a brand they loved, Dreamin’ Man, a cafe in the 11th arrondissement, to open a smaller takeaway window for coffee and pastries.

“What we love is the flexibility to keep being creative,” Joste says. For the founders, the space and food business were impermanent and malleable depending on shifting trends and desires.

Fashion thrives on innovation and change. Its business is based on the fickle interests of tastemakers. As chefs and restaurateurs mesh with the worlds of art and design, they risk leaping from one unstable industry to another, from the pan into the fire. But, as the two industries ebb and flow over one another, willing creative collaborators can generally count on a few incontrovertible truths.

“When it comes down to it, good people in good places create the vibes,” Pagès says. “Fashion is about being seen in the right place — and that won’t change.”

Originally from London, Rooksana Hossenally has been a Paris-based food and travel journalist and author for the last decade. Most recently, she launched a newsletter What’s Up, Paris? about places and people of Paris that have flown under the radar.