In Paris, Asian Creatives Are Challenging What French Culture Can—and Should—Be

22.11.2023 - 11:39 / cntraveler.com

In September, hours after landing in Paris, I headed straight to Signature Montmartre, a French-Korean bistro friends had been lavishing with praise. But already this is a series of words I find startling. I had lived and worked in Paris awhile during college; I go back when I can; until this trip, I didn't recall noticing a Korean shop or restaurant here. The bistro's lights shone from large windows like an inviting beacon, guiding me to food that was, as reported, astonishing: French cuisine shot through with distinctly Korean flavors, like tender prawn-filled perilla in a curry aioli, followed by a fig tart with jujube cream, one of the most delicate, fascinating pastries I've ever had.

I talked about all this with Signature Montmartre's pastry chef Youngrim Kim. We spoke in Korean, ringed by convivial diners conversing in French. “As Korea's culture has become more known in the world, there's been an explosive growth of Korean food in Paris,” Kim said. “People come in asking for kimchi.”

Paris’s Pont Alexandre III, connecting the 7th and 8th arrondissements

Nonette’s bánh mì use simple, fresh ingredients

It hasn't been at all easy, though, to bring Korean ingredients into a pastry like the fig tart, which in Paris is generally considered French, period, with traditionally little space for chefs diverging from expected flavors. People still balk at hints of spiciness in a pastry, Kim said, let alone staples like doenjang, a soybean paste, or gochugaru, a powder made of dried chiles. But Kim persists, and hallelujah.

This would turn out to be a leitmotif of the trip: French Asian artists, chefs, and others are making increasingly celebrated creations, and doing so in ways that let them be seen, eaten, and experienced outside the boxes of their compatriots' expectations. I'd last visited Paris in 2019; since then, I'd heard and read of a striking rise in the prominence of Asian food, art, and fashion in the city.

France has fraught historical relationships with Asian countries and cultures, and by fraught I also, of course, mean colonial. Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and other parts of Asia are former French colonies; in my own experiences of Paris, I'd witnessed very little celebration of anything Asian, the sole exception being a longstanding respect for and obsession with Japan's cultural products—an obsession that, to my eye and to not a few Asian friends' eyes, can also include notes of appropriation, typecasting, and fetishization. But this new prominence sounded, perhaps, different. In conversation, Parisians had suggested that this change was a reflection of the times: The more global awareness of millennials and Gen Z'ers, as well as the exposure to other cultures and cuisines on social media,