A Sunny New Restaurant in a Parisian Train Station

15.08.2024 - 11:18 / nytimes.com

“I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now,” a new book published by Aperture, features wide-ranging portfolios by 25 photographers. As Pauline Vermare, a co-editor of the book, writes in her introductory essay, the primary focus of the women showcased in the book “has been, and remains, to find the means to be independent and represent their own experiences and views of the world.” Among the works included are those by the 77-year-old photographer Miyako Ishiuchi, who co-founded a photography magazine, main, in 1996. The book contains photos from “Yokosuka Story,” a 1970s series focusing on her hometown, the location of a major U.S. Navy base, and a still-life of a lipstick, part of her “Mother’s” (2000-2005) series, for which she photographed her deceased mother’s possessions. One of the youngest photographers in the book, Momo Okabe, 43, trains her lens on her own body and those of her friends, capturing both everyday experiences and life-changing events such as gender-affirming surgery and pregnancy. From photojournalism to works of collage, the book, as its introduction states, “lays the groundwork for understanding the enormity of what has been overlooked.” .

Marius, the sunny brasserie that opened in July at Paris’s Gare de Lyon, offers a pan-Mediterranean menu and a window into how much French eating habits have changed since the train station reopened after a remodeling and expansion by the architect Marius Toudoire in 1900. Then, the station’s main restaurant, the famously opulent Le Train Bleu, which opened in 1901, was named after the night trains that ran between Paris and Nice. Leisure travel was still the preserve of the wealthy, and the menu vaunted the gastronomic glory of France with dishes like roast leg of lamb and crêpes suzette. Now, France’s high-speed TGV trains have introduced the French not only to the cooking of Provence and Nice but to that of all the countries that surround the Mediterranean. Gastronomic inclusiveness is the goal of Marius chef Yoni Saada, who says he wrote his menu to be “bursting with sunshine and spices.”

Saada’s grandfather was the Tunisian founder of the oldest kosher butcher shop in Paris’s Marais district, and Saada grew up eating both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jewish cooking. After graduating from Paris’s Ecole Ferrandi culinary school and working at fine-dining destinations like the city’s Hôtel Meurice, he founded Zaza, a restaurant specializing in Israeli street food, in the Second Arrondissement. At Marius, dishes include Tunis’s favorite seaside snack: brick à l’œuf de la Goulette, a crispy pastry filled with an organic egg, canned tuna, potatoes and parsley, served with a side of harissa. If Le Train Bleu,