When Printemps opens its doors in New York’s Financial District on March 21, it will do so with five food and beverage concepts. Four of them fit within a standard...
When Printemps opens its doors in New York’s Financial District on March 21, it will do so with five food and beverage concepts. Four of them fit within a standard category of culinary luxury one expects at a place that sells designer goods by Bottega Veneta and Rick Owens: there’s a champagne bar, a raw bar, a regular bar, and an all-day café that serves croissants and espresso. But the fifth? That’s in a category all of its own: Maison Passerelle, a fine dining restaurant by James Beard Award-winning chef Gregory Gourdet that explores that complicated culinary legacy left by French colonialism—and how those colonies influenced French cuisine right back.
“I come from a place of culture and history,” Gourdet says of his cooking style. Born in Queens to Haitian immigrants, he grew up eating classic island dishes like sos pwa—black bean puree over rice—for dinner. (“It's really one of the most humble, yet delicious and comforting dishes out there,” says Gourdet.) As a young adult, he studied cuisines far beyond the borders of both America and the Caribbean as a student at the Culinary Institute of America. Then, he became a master at several of them: for seven years, he worked under the legendary French chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and for another 10, he led Pan-Asian restaurant Departure in Portland to critical acclaim. That acclaim only got louder when he opened his first restaurant Kann, which won the James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant in 2023.
When Printemps approached him to oversee food and beverage at their New York location, he knew there needed to be a French element to connect back to the brand’s Parisian roots. But he also knew that the city didn’t necessarily “need another French restaurant.” So what could he—and should he—bring to the table (quite literally), given he was trained in just about everything?
French-Haitian food would make sense given his own background. But he wanted to go beyond that, to “all the places around the world where French has been spoken or is spoken,” he says, from Afro-French countries to French Asian countries like Laos and Vietnam to even Louisiana. All of them have signature dishes that meld indigenous and French flavors, creating a truly original cuisine in the process. “It’s complicated,” he acknowledges of the cultural legacy he’s exploring.
He quickly got to work on the menu. There’s a creole cassoulet with sausage and chicken, as well as a cane syrup glazed duck with pineapple and tamarind jus. A dry-aged strip steak is rubbed in an organic Haitian coffee chili and spice mix. (Gourdet imports beans from a Haitian coffee company Cafe Kreyol, which he also uses in drinks and desserts, like his chocolate ganache.) And yes, there's even his own take on sos pwa with a red kidney bean sauce. “Any opportunity to present the flavors of the diaspora are important to me,” he says. “Also, the opportunity to do so in a fine ding setting—that’s the setting this type of cuisine deserves to be in.”
The interiors are by AD100 designer Laura Gonzalez and have a gilded tropical air, with a red jasper marble bar and bench seating upholstered in Pierre Frey’s Le Manach fabric. On the walls is a fresco by David Roma, inspired by the sunsets of former French colonies in the Caribbean, central Africa, and Southeast Asia.
In French, passerelle means gateway or bridge. Which is exactly what Gourdet wants his Maison Passerelle to be: “It’s a bridge to these flavors and how they made their way around the world—and how there is a line through all these different countries,” he says.