Gregory Gourdet’s Maison Passerelle Tells the Story of French Food Through Its Former Colonies

When the glass door of Brass Riz & Grill Express opened, steam poured out into the rainy February afternoon. waited inside, wearing head-to-toe black and standing next to a buffet with its hotel pans brimming. Gourdet, a Queens kid, grew up in a two-story brick and clapboard house a short drive from the restaurant, set in a Caribbean enclave just past JFK and nowhere close to a subway. He hadn’t returned to the neighborhood in decades—not since appearing on opening his hitmaking Portland, Ore. restaurant , or winning two Awards. 

But this year marked official return to , if not Queens, with the debut of Printemps in the Financial District in late March. Gourdet oversees the cooking in five outlets at the French luxury retailer. There’s Café Jalu for coffee and viennoiserie, raw bar Salon Vert, the Champagne Bar, and the Red Room Bar. But it’s at fine-dining Maison Passerelle, opened April 17, where Gourdet has bottled magic from his multitudes: a third-culture prep school kid, a student of fashion and history, a perfectionist, a sober chef, a man adept at straddling worlds.

Gourdet’s father grew up in L’Asile, Haiti a town without running water, and his parents emigrated from the island nation and in the ’60s worked in hospitals. In the seventh grade, a young Gourdet started commuting two hours into Manhattan via jitney and train to attend Prep for Prep, a program that readies students for elite private schools, and he left Queens a year and half later to attend St. Andrew’s School, whose Delaware campus sets the backdrop of Dead Poets Society. More recently, he escorted Anna Wintour around Printemps.

Back at Brass Riz, Gourdet and I tucked through a service door from the buffet to an adjoining nightclub, empty except for the cleaning crew. A server delivered an iceberg salad; poisson gros sel, a fish stew; rice and peas; poul nan sos, a chicken dish Gourdet’s grandmother cooked on Sundays; and sos pwa, a complex purée of white beans and aromatics served with white rice.

Gourdet trained at the Culinary Institute of America and spent formative years cooking for Jean-Georges Vongerichten in New York City, but he did not learn how to cook traditional Haitian dishes until he prepared to open Kann. Sos pwa was the first dish his mom taught him to make, and her recipe appears on the menu of Maison Passerelle. “It’s the most humble, humble food of Haiti, a bowl of rice and a bowl of beans,” Gourdet says. “We’re just serving it with vintage Christofle silverware. For me, it’s important to serve foods that aren’t often seen in fine-dining settings.”

Gourdet learned about the Printemps opportunity in 2023, just a year into running Kann. He hadn’t planned on devoting himself to a new project so soon, but his best friends still lived in New York City and he had spent the last five years immersing himself in the finer details of fashion. He would also have the support of , an operating partner in the project. “I thought, ‘French heritage, I get back to New York, it’s fashion adjacent, not my money. You can’t pass this up,’” says Gourdet, who earned a French degree before attending culinary school (and hired a French tutor as soon as he applied for the Printemps gig).

Laura Lendrum, Printemps America CEO, saw the New York launch as a hospitality project, with food and beverage woven into every scene; the brand has aggressively marketed itself as, “Not a Department Store.” Guests can pick up a glass of Champagne, or nonalcoholic bubbles, to sip while they browse Louboutins. The concierge will whisk packages to your hotel or apartment while you have dinner. “It’s French savoir-faire meets American hospitality,” Lendrum said in an interview with . 

Lendrum, at first, considered bringing in a chef from Paris. I can imagine risk-averse investors eyeing Vongertichen, Boulud, or Ducasse, but the corporate team was immediately drawn to Gourdet’s vision of French food told through former colonies, an expansive territory for a chef as storyteller. “It’s a big project, and it needed to be personal,” says Gourdet, “I thought, ‘What am I most passionate about?’ Really, it’s stories that aren’t often told.”

For his menu, Gourdet folds in influences from North Africa, West Africa, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Tahiti, Reunion, Saint Lucia, Louisiana, Nova Scotia and French Canada, and Haiti. In someone else’s hands the results might be scattershot. But Gourdet is approaching 50. He has run restaurants that cranked 600 covers a day. He has opened a passion project in Kann. He told me, frankly, that he no longer needed to be a media darling.

At Maison Passerelle, diners get a fully formed chef, at the height of his cooking prowess and whose creativity is rooted in history and technique—not wild flavor bending or an egomaniacal number of courses. Service is family style. There’s not a tasting menu in sight. (Though diners might expect an amuse bouche, which on opening night was a demitasse of tomato-lemongrass-coconut soup with a wicked flicker of heat.)

Gourdet suggests opening with a seafood tower. The one here feels like it flew in straight from St. Barts to greet you with caviar, crab-onion dip, lobster claws, shrimp, and oysters blinged out with pikliz mignonette and Creole cocktail sauce. Servers dropped a plantain bread course, a warm loaf flecked with sea salt and crispy at the edges. Gourdet paired it with cultured butter, plus a vegan spread shot through with fragrant, spicy epis, the Haitian seasoning that acts as Gourdet’s mother sauce. I entreat you: betray dairy here and jolt your meal to a start.

Too few contemporary restaurants pay attention to the soup course (I suspect they’re too busy fawning/yawning over little gem salads). At Printemps, in spring, Gourdet’s asparagus soup is a brand statement, verdant green and poured tableside from a silver teapot. He started with the creamy French original in mind and reimagined it as haute Haitian, adding coconut milk and epis to the base. A garden of garnishes—blanched asparagus, smoked and pickled cucumber, mint, fresh peas, and peekytoe crab—rendered each bite distinct.

I watched the pass as Gourdet’s team lined up fat grilled white asparagus over a perfect round of Creole cream sauce. They nestled perfect roulades of slow-cooked grouper into a bed of pepper confit. The coffee-rubbed, 30-day aged New York strip would raise eyebrows at Relais de l’Entrecôte with its coffee jus and Creole ketchup, but it might be one of the smartest little steaks in a city awash with them. I twirled toothsome strands of spaghetti, tossed in a heady sauce of tomatoes and lobster bodies and with enough tender lobster claw and tail to enjoy with each bite.

One line cook seemingly devoted her evening to the duck course, slicing breast after breast into bites with an ideal ratio of crackling fat and skin and sumptuous meat. Had Mme. Chanel dined with me, there’s not a single item she would have removed from the plate: duck breast glazed in Steen’s cane syrup, a nod to Louisiana; a confit duck leg as plump as they come; perfect cubes of pineapple tossed in lime juice and zest and a touch more syrup; and tangy tamarind jus. My actual dining companion, dressed in her nonprofit workwear, was slack jawed at the precision of the seasoning. Gourdet’s cooking here—joyful, rigorous, mature, and bold—is a reminder of how much the béchamel-soaked motherland owes to her colonies

Maison Passerelle’s pastry chef Rachel Green spent time at , Per Se, and, most recently, Cafe Carmellini. She stocks the pastry cases with laminated goods at the Café Jalu and offers a tight dessert menu at Maison Passerelle: hibiscus-guava sorbet with ginger-lime ice and mint, Haitian chocolate ganache, a spring-y rhubarb parfait with coriander and burnt cinnamon, and a coconut chiboust. I confess that I had forgotten exactly what a chiboust was, but holy warm coconut cream pie, it was a revelation with makrut lime, a shattering cookie base, and a salty coconut sorbet. (Do yourself a favor and order a glass of Alfred Merkelbach spätlese Riesling for pairing fireworks.)

Maison Passerelle’s setting is as layered and dynamic as its food, a world-building collaboration between designer Laura Gonzalez and Gourdet. They lined the open kitchen in water lily tiles, I imagine in a wink to the impressionist master of scene, texture, and mood. Down the length of the opposite wall, there’s a mural of Haitian sunsets with rippling layers of blue, pink, and orange. A stained-glass installation by Pierre Marie, known for his Hermès scarves, is an elegant kaleidoscope and stamp of grand ambition.

“Gregory Gourdet is magic,” Lendrum has said of the chef.

In the days and parties leading up to Maison Passerelle’s opening, Gourdet held court in full . His grandfather was a tailor back in Haiti, and he’s always had a taste for custom suits and designer clothes. But he’s back in chef whites now and in the trenches of a high-profile opening, upon which a retail darling’s success depends. It’s a habanero-laced homecoming served on Maison Pichon Uzès ceramics at an iconic address.

“New York City operates at a higher standard. I can push myself, and the food, further,” Gourdet told me back at Brass Riz, as we shared plates of fish stew and silky sos pwa. “This is my opportunity to create the finest restaurant I’ve ever been a part of.”

Click  to see more photos of Maison Passerelle at Printemps in New York.

Credit: robbreport.com