Grand Paris is a column about the changing relationship between Paris and its suburbs, told through architecture and the food of its various diaspora communities and neighbourhoods. You can read the previous entries here:
A Google Map of over fifty places eaten at during this series can be found after the paywall.
Grand Paris Part 5: The Enabling Constraint
Fourteen Japanese and Japanese-inspired small businesses in Paris, by Jonathan Nunn
Lobster spaghetti at Le Rigmarole
“Enabling constraint!” shouts Jessica Yang, suddenly remembering. We’re standing outside Le Rigmarole, the restaurant in Paris’s 11e arrondissement that she co-runs with her partner Robert Compagnon. The meal I’ve just eaten less resembled lunch than a sleight of hand: a dozen precisely prepared dishes – raw scallop, grilled chicken aortas, tsukune with chicken-fat paratha – distinct from any food sent to other tables, made and served by just three people all without breaking a sweat. I have been to Le Rigmarole three times in my life: once for dinner, once in its post-pandemic incarnation as a pizzeria and once for lunch late last year, and each time I feel like a dupe getting fooled by a huckster performing three-card monte. I still can’t quite work out how it’s done, although the free role given to their kitchen porter Moshu Noor Amin, both a cook and pot wash behind the scenes, is key to the prestige. None of this trickery is actually necessary. The cooking is good enough that it could rest on its laurels – as a tasting menu restaurant, or a buzzy wine bar serving individual small plates, like every other place in the 11e. Instead, it does something that is there purely to give delight to the diner. Or so it seems.
Raw scallop
Cuttlefish and yoghurt
Le Rigmarole is perhaps the best example of the French-Japanese axis of cooking which has become the dominant cuisine in Paris over the last decade. Sometimes it is Japan-infatuated French chefs, but also Japanese chefs who have come to Paris to challenge themselves; for every place like Le Rigmarole perfecting yakitori, you will find a Japanese patissier, like Mori Yoshidain the 7th arrondissement, turning out exquisite Paris-Brests. On the face of it, this seems strange – French cuisine tends to transform ingredients, while Japanese cuisine tends to preserve them – but there are also key synergies: the shared love for aestheticising food; the nouvelle cuisine created in the 1960s by French chefs finding a delicacy in Japanese cuisine that had been lacking in their own; a monomaniacal appreciation for buckwheat. But what makes this a uniquely Parisian infatuation is the shared understanding of what social theorists Erin Manning and Brian Massumi call the “enabling constraint”, something that has influenced Le Rigmarole’s development and made the centre of Paris the most exciting place outside Japan to eat Japanese food.
