Tucked into a quiet street steps away from the Palais Royal and Tuileries Gardens is a restaurant that has all of Paris talking.
In less than seven months, 19 Saint-Roch, cult chef Pierre Touitou’s latest caper, has already established itself as a new institution for the French capital—one that fluidly adapts to both culinary tourists and local 9-to-5ers in search of a lunch break pick-me-up. But the speed with which the elevated yet unpretentious bistro has made its name shouldn’t obscure the years of research and renovations Touitou dedicated to make the restaurant a reality. After his early days as a culinary wunderkind under the mentorship of greats like Alain Ducasse, Pierre Gagnaire, and the Levha sisters and buzzy stints at hotspots Déviant and Vivant, the chef left brick-and-mortar restaurants behind for four years—deciding to concentrate on pop-ups around the globe and immersing himself in the world of private events and production. Then he happened upon the spot 19 Saint-Roch now calls home, tapped his architect grandfather to give its bones a refresher, and refined the restaurant’s culinary approach—fastidiously seasonal and sleekly juggling crowd-pleasers and more cerebral fare.
After welcoming an influx of new faces during fashion week and Art Basel Paris, Touitou rang CULTURED to dish on growing up (“I’m no longer 23,” he admits with a laugh), making a hard job better, and why customers shouldn’t assume anything walking into 19 Saint-Roch.
Where are you, and what's in your system?
We're currently in my office that often becomes a small private dining room, hidden behind wine fridges. I’ve had a scone and several coffees.
How do you take your coffee?
Espresso or filter, depending on the place.
You're six months into opening 19 Saint-Roch. How are you feeling?
With an opening, there’s a lot of work before [but there’s also a ton] after—it's never fully done. We're adjusting and deciding where we want to be, where we want to go, and how we are going to get there. I'm very happy with what we have achieved since we opened. It's not too far from what I expected, which is good [laughs].
You broke onto the scene as a culinary wunderkind in your early 20s. A decade later, do you see this opening as marking a new stage in your career? What has it taught you?
Well, the size of the restaurant implies that I can't plate every plate or season everything myself like I used to. As you said, I'm no longer 23. I think it's just about growing up and accepting the fact that you work with people you trust. They trust you, and you trust them. Some people are more comfortable than others with, for instance, spontaneity in the kitchen—changing something in the menu, making a one-off during service, coming up with something new. It's about finding your limit and knowing your staff. Trust is essential.
I'm interested in the choice of the neighborhood, steps away from the Louvre and the Palais Royal. Did you think about its culinary legacy, and how you’re maybe expanding or challenging it?
It wasn't my first choice. I was looking at the Left Bank because it's where I grew up, but I couldn't find anything I liked. When I first walked into this restaurant—that was at the time a Japanese spot. I liked that it's very central, but we're in a calm street where cars are not allowed from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. And I'm a convinced atheist, but we’re across from a very nice church that brings a nice atmosphere.
In terms of the menu development, walk me through the story you're trying to tell at 19 Saint-Roch through the dishes that you're offering.
When we opened, I thought it would be easier to have the same menu for lunch and dinner. We did the first two days like that, and an hour into the first lunch service, we realized we had to change immediately. The night menu I always like having fixed, with four snacks, four starters, four mains, one cheese, and three desserts. Four times, four things. I always like to have snacks you can eat with your hands that can leave the kitchen in 35 seconds if needed. Two of them have been on the menu everyday since we opened, and they'll probably stay for a while. Then we try to change with the seasons. When it's very hot, we’ll do a cold broth.
For lunch right now, we have four snacks. Then we’ll always do two starters and two mains. And for dessert, a scoop of ice cream or sorbet and a very simple Spanish almond cake. The food we do at lunch is slightly different from what we do at night. It's less cerebral and a bit more straightforward because this is a very business-oriented neighborhood, where some people will want a three-hour meal that acts as a meeting and others will tell us they have half an hour to eat. They’ll be like, “We'll skip the coffee because we have a coffee machine at work, and we need to debrief in front of the coffee machine before entering the meeting room” Lunch is quite fun because you have to do a lot. We do a full sitting in an hour and 15 minutes, basically.
I’d love for you to talk a bit about the kind of social experience you want to create for the customer, outside of the food in and of itself. What kind of restaurant do you want 19 Saint-Roch to be—or what do you don't want it to be?
Whether you're sitting at the bar in front of the kitchen, at a table at the back of the restaurant, or at one of the large five-tops when you enter, you can have very, very different experiences. Our job is to make sure the person sitting down is in the right space to have an experience. We want to do everything we can to accommodate people. It's a very small detail, but we can individually change the volume of the speakers in the restaurant. If it's a younger table, we’ll turn it up. The lighting is individualized. Those are just two small things that we can do to help adjust the customer experience overall.
You mentioned this was a Japanese restaurant before. How much did you change in the design before the opening?
We changed everything. A month before they closed, they organized a small sale of the plateware they had. So we have a few of their bowls—and a framed picture of soldiers, maybe GIs, taken from across the street at the end of World War II. Those are the only things I kept from the previous restaurant. In terms of design, though, because there were going to be a lot of new things, I wanted everything that could be secondhand to be secondhand, like the chairs and the table we're sitting at right now. I have a chair guy now in Brittany. I spent hours on Le Bon Coin [the French equivalent of Craigslist]. Just hours of scrolling to find the right size, the right color, everything. I worked with my grandfather, who was an architect. I think it's one of the smallest projects he’s ever done, which was quite funny. I didn't want to recreate an old bistro, it was going to be new anyways. But I just wanted it to look nice in 10 or 20 years.
You had four years as a nomadic chef after leaving Vivant and Déviant and before opening 19 Saint-Roch. What was that in-between period like? Are there things you wanted to do differently in re-entering the non-nomadic restaurant world that you learned from those years?
Well, first of all, [it started] during Covid, so that was a bit different. I was really happy to take some time off and chill at first. I started working when I was 16, and it was just over a decade later. I wanted to travel. I almost moved to New York at some point, then I reconsidered moving to Japan. I forced myself not to do pop-ups in Paris, because I didn't want to deal with trying to make something that looked like me for the people who knew me. I did Barcelona, Mexico, London, the Loire Valley a few times, and Arles for six months at the Luma Foundation. Then I did private events in Paris. It was really fun for me to discover the production part of things. I really enjoyed finding the right plates, the right flowers, renting tables. Then it took me over a year to look for the space and exactly a year of renovations. People tell me, “Come on, you took four years off,” and “I'm like, no, no, no, it took me two and a half years to open a restaurant.”
You’ve been working in Paris’s food community for the past 15 years. What do you want to see more or less of in the city’s restaurant world?
I don't feel I'm entitled to tell people what to do with their own restaurants. If somebody wants to open a fish taco restaurant, or a tomato-focused restaurant in a country where tomatoes are good three months a year, I'm not the one to judge. I know it's a luxury, but I cook what I want to cook. We serve what we want to serve. We defend winemakers we want to defend. I think 98% of our wine list is without any type of chemicals.
There’s been a real reckoning with the more toxic aspects of kitchen culture in the past 15 years as well…
It's a very hard job. But we try to make it better. We're open four days a week, for instance. We do lunch and dinner, so eight shifts, but we're closed on weekends. And it's the small things. We have a coffee machine for staff. We buy nice things for staff meals. We try to encourage a good and open-minded culture.
Are there things you want people to know before stepping into the restaurant?
Don’t assume anything. Don’t look at the menu we served three weeks before. Sometimes we have people come in with a picture they saw three months ago, and they ask, “Why don’t you have this on the menu?” It’s always changing. Maybe next year we’ll have it again, but we don’t know.
Six months into this journey, what are you most excited about for the next six months?
Fixing everything that broke the first sixth months [laughs].
