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Towards the end of your meal at 19 Saint Roch, a newish Parisian restaurant in the 1st arrondissement, a block from the Tuileries, do me a favour and order the île flottante (floating island). It may be the best île flottante you ever have. The meringue, a perfect cube instead of the usual mound, comes decorated with sesame praline in a moat of crème anglaise that is flecked with – of all things – smoked Béarn chilli pepper. It is ravishing to behold and eat.
The dessert, which followed a starter of raw line-caught grouper with cherries and walnuts, and duck with bell pepper au jus and giblet salad when I visited, is one of the standout creations of chef patron Pierre Touitou, who is probably best known for running the kitchen at buzzy natural wine bar Vivant and its little brother Déviant in the 10th. The cooking at 19 Saint Roch is “less brutalist and punchy” than anything you would have found at those previous venues. The île flottante (“a great classic dessert that uses very few ingredients”) typifies his new approach: simplicity and refinement with riffs on the traditional French playbook.
These could be said to be family preoccupations. Touitou’s father is Jean Touitou, founder of Parisian clothing company APC, which is known for its minimal Gallic designs. On matters of style: “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” says Touitou. “I’ve always liked clean lines.”
When we meet, the six-foot-tall, broad-shouldered 31-year-old is dressed in chef whites with a fine pair of oxblood clogs from Danish brand Sanita. But even outside the kitchen, he favours a strict uniform: blue, white or striped Brooks Brothers shirts (rather than the more slim-fitting shirts from APC), Fruit of the Loom tank-tops, and suede boots from Camargue-based shoe brand La Botte Gardiane. “I started wearing their boots 10 years ago,” he tells me. “Now I have six pairs. I like them for the same reason I like my clothes. They are simple. I don’t have to think about what shoes to wear because I wear boots every day. I don’t have to tie my own shoelaces. I don’t even have to think about socks because the boots hide my socks.” He likens it to working from a template menu or a mise en place as a chef: “Not having to think about such things allows you to have more spontaneity in everything else you do.”
His art director mother Agnes Chemetoff worked on visuals for APC among other brands. But Touitou was never interested in following his parents into fashion or design: “I don’t think my father or mother even wanted me to work with them or have the burden of carrying something on,” he says. Instead, he loved eating growing up and fell in love with restaurants (“When I was five or six, I remember drawing a house with its own restaurant”). As a chef he got his start as a teen apprentice at Alain Ducasse’s Plaza Athénée before working at Sketch by Pierre Gagnaire in London and Le Servan in Paris among other places.
His menus at 19 Saint Roch are rooted in French cuisine but the influences range from the Mediterranean to the Far East with ingredients such as bottarga and miso and techniques like cooking in vinegar. His signature hors d’oeuvre, the lo bak go, are Chinese turnip cakes modelled on dim sum but styled after panisse (chickpea fritters). “The cuisine I do here doesn’t need to be labelled,” he says. “When people ask, I usually say, ‘I try to make good food.’” Nonetheless, the global lexicon speaks to his extensive travels and family heritage.
“Both of my parents used to travel to Japan a lot for work. Growing up I probably had equal amounts Japanese and French food,” he says. “My mother is half-Russian, half-Norman so we ate a lot of haddock with potatoes and crème fraîche. And my father is Jewish Tunisian so meatballs in tomato sauce with couscous was a family favourite.”
From his paternal grandmother, he inherited a love for traditional Tunisian dishes such as klaya (braised meat), nikitouche (chicken soup) and mloukhya (meat and jute leaves stew). When she passed away, her recipes were collected in a book; inscribed on the cover was her name, Odette Touitou, followed by “AF2701” – the Air France flight from Tunis that brought the family to Paris in the 1950s.
“It’s not a traditional cookbook,” says Touitou of the volume, which includes a chapter on family reminiscences from his great-grandfather and on the German occupation of Tunisia. “Most of the recipes start the same way: ‘In a large pot add a drop of olive oil…’ My favourite is a recipe for fennel salad, which is a couple of lines: cut the fennel. Add lemon juice and pepper. Do it an hour before serving.” That taste for simplicity runs in the family.
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