Steak frites at Brasserie Lipp. | Brasserie Lipp We both came to France in our 20s, one of us (Johno) for work at Activision and the other (Mashama) for a cooking school, and we both fell in love with Paris in our own ways. After we got the Grey in Savannah off the ground, we talked about opening a restaurant in Paris. We came to France to revise our book, Black, White, and The Grey, and after a couple of months eating out here, we were decided and started looking for space. Now, we just opened L’Arrêt in the 7th arrondissement. We’re still in that beginning stage of trying to get a team together. We also opened in a very old building — there’s been a restaurant here for a hundred years — and we had to do a lot of renovations, since the last time it was renovated was in the early ’70s. We tried to keep a lot of the spirit of the old place, preserving and restoring the furniture, the lighting, and the bar face. We’re also bringing American culture and hospitality to Paris, and getting folks who grew up here to buy into that. There’s a relationship between Parisian food, French food, rural French cooking, and American Southern cooking. It’s not a small undertaking, even though it’s a small restaurant. As Parisians have been getting to know us, we’ve been getting to know our local dining community even better and returning to old favorites. Below are some…
