At Maison Passerelle, the new art deco brasserie at the Manhattan branch of French department store Printemps, the shrimp cocktail presentation is impressive, the ocean trout elegantly plated with cracker-crisp skin, the coconut chiboust light and airy to close out the meal. But the best thing on the menu might be the homeliest, a simple bowl of rice and beans, the recipe inspired by chef Gregory Gourdet’s mother’s home cooking.
“It’s the first thing my mom taught me to make when I was learning the family recipes,” he says of his velvety braised kidney beans. “Mine’s a little bit spicier than hers.”
Maison Passerelle at Printemps in New York © Gieves Anderson for Printemps New York
Gourdet, a first-generation Haitian-American raised in Queens, oversees five food and drink outlets in the shopping complex near Wall Street, including a café, champagne bar and raw bar. At his flagship, Maison Passerelle, the menu mixes influences from francophone Africa, south-east Asia, the Caribbean and North America, but it’s his Haitian heritage in particular that makes the food sing.
Gourdet’s shrimp cocktail starter, three gargantuan specimens served on crushed ice, is kissed with an incendiary creole cocktail sauce; his ocean trout is marinated in a Haitian spice blend and served with a fiery red plantain purée and house-made ti malice, a traditional onion and scotch bonnet pickle. He rubs the steak in Haitian coffee and serves Haitian chocolate in the petits fours.
