The Grey to bring southern flavour to Paris next year

The team behind one of America’s best-loved southern cuisine restaurants, The Grey, chef Mashama Bailey (pictured) and restaurateur Johno Morisano, have announced the opening of a Paris restaurant in 2024.

The pair have acquired the Parisian cafe L’Esperance in the seventh arrondissement and have been quietly introducing locals to the taste of the American South with the introduction of various southern staples ahead of a complete overhaul of the space into a restaurant next year. The space will seat 50, with a terrace adding additional tops and the wine cellar below open to private functions.

Both Bailey and Morisano can trace French connections. The pair decamped to Paris during the editing phase of their best-selling cookbook and memoir, ‘Black, White and The Grey’, in 2019. The time was filled with copy revisions during the day and Paris bistros and wine in the evening. The pair soon fell in love with the city and its culinary traditions.

Of course, as a formally trained chef, Bailey has plotted a course through the American culinary education system, which has its foundation in the French tradition. The menu of the new restaurant will be French-focused but will incorporate The Grey’s dedication to Southern, port-city cuisine, for which the Savannah, Georgia restaurant is famed.

The Paris venture is part of a wider expansion for The Grey which has seen them open a restaurant, Diner Bar, and a restaurant shop, The Grey Market, in Austin, Texas.

The City of Lights is experiencing a transatlantic culinary exchange currently, with the opening of Dominique Crenn’s Paris restaurant Golden Poppy, which is wowing Parisians and introducing them to the excellence of the San Francisco-based chef’s West Coast culinary philosophy. The city’s fine dining looks to be shedding the orthodoxy of classic French culinary tradition to welcome a new phase of dynamic cross-cultural inspiration.