Like so many New Yorkers, an uptown institution is moving to Florida.
30.09.2023 - 11:03 / forbes.com
“I want to be able to look back when I’m 35 or 40 and be proud of what I’ve achieved,” says chef Victor Blanchet, a young chef known for his astute sense of style, as we sit at a table of his new digs, Halo Paris, a restaurant and store bridging the gap between food and fashion, slated to open on November 11.
At just 24, his resumé is longer than most 40 year-olds'. He's gone from the innovative one-star Neso to the three-star L'Arpège by way of the Relais & Châteaux Castel Clara Hotel and Spa in Belle Ile, Brittany. Adopted from Haitian parents as a baby, the French chef has been working in kitchens since the age of 14 and hasn't looked back. "I was a dissipated child, let's say, and I needed to be doing something active, hence why I went into cooking." After being called for French Top Chef, which aired earlier this year, a handful of restaurateurs have been fighting over this bright spark to have him head up their kitchens. The duo behind new restaurant concept Halo won his heart. “First, the founders are young, which I liked, but it’s the blend of fashion and food that got me,” says Blanchet, his tattooed arms sheathed in crisp new Halo-stamped kitchen whites.
We’re sat in the buzzy Sentier neighborhood packed with restaurants and bars, inside a former wholesale retail workshop. Before that, the building was an upscale brothel, the Hôtel Osmond, built in 1750, before it fell into the hands of the Vatican, still the landlord to this day.
The space is being transformed into a boutique of revolving creative concepts with a sleek restaurant hidden through the door of one of the fitting rooms. "The idea is for the boutique space to be a hub where young designers will be able to showcase their work for two months at a time," Matthieu Olai, Halo co-founder tells me. "We'll take a commission on sales, but it's rent-free. And that's important for us because we want to be able to help support young creators."
The duo might be fresh out of business school, but Victor Goyo and Matthieu Olai are old souls. Their creative families — the former has a ceramic artist mother and the latter a mother who founded a concept store in the south — have given them good footing in creative industries, as well an eye for detail that's rarely seen in such young entrepreneurs. The pair have verve and vision, while remaining refreshingly modest. "We know we can't do everything, that we can't have the know-how to do it all, so we want to work with people we admire, who are better than we are, to learn from them and make Halo something really special," says Goyo.
Behind a mint-green curtain hanging in front what is seemingly just another fitting room in the boutique, behind a heavy door, visitors in the know will arrive in a
Like so many New Yorkers, an uptown institution is moving to Florida.
On a steamy summer Monday in Paris’s 11th Arrondissement, the chef Rose Chalalai Singh, 43, is unloading a suitcase of cooking equipment at her new private dining space, Rose Kitchen. The kitchen is still in its final stages of refurbishment but, says Singh, “I can cook anywhere as long as there’s water and gas.”
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Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write: bedbugs have taken over the city of Paris, and we are now faced with the prospect that the outbreak could travel overseas. The infestation began just before Paris Fashion Week (yes, these bugs have good taste), when reports broke of increased sightings of the insects in homes, cinemas, trains and even hospitals. Now, questions are being asked about the safety of traveling to and from Paris; what we can do to prevent the spread, and whether the critters are already settling in our mattresses. Below, we answer all your questions about travel and the bedbug spread.
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After bedbug sightings on trains and cinemas in France, an expert is warning that the blood-sucking parasites could be hitching a ride to the UK on the Eurostar.