Critics from Le Figaro to the restaurant Web site Le Fooding have been waiting to see what chef-owner Pierre Touitou would do with 19 Saint Roch, his third restaurant in Paris.
At just 31 years old, but with 15 years of experience, he’s practically an elder statesman of the Paris food scene. With his previous restaurants—the edgy Vivant, where he served small plates from behind a counter, and Déviant, his deluxe wine bar—Touitou mastered cool. But could the affable, Paris-born chef be seriously sophisticated?
As close to the Louvre and the Palais Royal as it is to the Bourse, 19 Saint Roch is all that and more. As was proved by a recent visit on the heels of Paris Fashion Week to the restaurant, tucked behind a church in the First Arrondissement, it’s already a stylish canteen.
Unhappy in school, Touitou began cooking at 16. For three years, he toggled between culinary courses and the kitchen at Alain Ducasse’s Relais Plaza restaurant at the Plaza Athenée. “I did salads and herbs for the first six months,” he recalls. “I learned most of what I know. It was my military service, in a way.”
He landed briefly at Pierre Gagnaire’s Sketch in London. “Probably the toughest thing I ever did in my life,” Touitou says. Back in Paris, he worked at restaurants such as Tatiana Levha’s esteemed Le Servan before cooking in South America. Vivant came to life after a chance meeting with his future business partner, Arnaud Lacombe, during a long layover in Paris. In that fateful sliver of a restaurant, Touitou made his name with just a home oven, two induction burners, and a blowtorch.
Bought out by Lacombe just before the pandemic, Touitou did events and residencies outside of Paris until he got tired of schlepping bins in his car and working in restaurants where the design details drove him nuts. A year of searching led him to a sleepy part of the First Arrondissement near his favorite coffee shop, Télescope, as well as the Japanese restaurants he grew up visiting.
The restaurant is designed and envisioned by Touitou, and created with the support of the architecture firm AUA Paul Chemetov, helmed by his grandfather. It reflects the attention to detail instilled by Touitou’s parents. (His mother, Agnès Chemetov, is an art director, and his father, Jean Touitou, is the founder of the minimalist clothing label APC.)
Touitou mastered cool. But could the affable, Paris-born chef be seriously sophisticated?
From the modernist plywood divider shielding Table Two from the street to the zoned-sound controls—much appreciated by those who value their hearing—each table gets the vibe right. The room makes everyone look and feel good, from the bankers, art curators, and designers at lunch to friends at the bar and, on the night I was there, Darren Star.
At Vivant, the kitchen was practically a one-man garage band. Here, Touitou is onstage with a polished ensemble, working alongside five cooks, all in chef’s whites and floor-length white aprons.
The refined yet playful food includes a steamed oyster with salmon roe and vegetables. The île in an île flottante floats as a cube. Riffing on his time with Gagnaire, who serves a protein in up to six iterations, Touitou sends out a satellite dish to play off the main course: seared lamb with white beans gets a surprising cold stew with lamb belly, tamarind and Vietnamese rau ram.
Touitou sources 80 percent of his vegetables from within 60 miles of the restaurant. The meat and fish—both of which are dry-aged in-house—are all French. He says that while the dishes include Asian and Mediterranean references from the chef’s travels and heritage, still, “What’s more French than cooking with sauces with French ingredients? Smoking a cigarette on a terrace, maybe.”
What could be more French than a chef who’s been training since his teens? But Touitou may be among the last of his breed. There are estimated to be 250,000 open hospitality jobs in France. Luckily, as 19 Saint Roch proves, this young elder statesman is likely to be around for a long time to come.
Christine Muhlke, a former editor at The New York Times and Bon Appétit, is a co-author of Wine Simple, with Le Bernardin’s Aldo Sohm, and a co-author of Phaidon’s Signature Dishes That Matter. She is also the founder of culinary consultancy Bureau X and the creator of the Xtine newsletter
