L’Eau Country

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Two powerhouses of Southern dining take their shows on le road to Paris, France.

The white Parisian couple puzzling over the menu at L’Arrêt wants to know what “rice middlins” is, and, well, fair enough—it’s tricky in English, too. Do I start with the broken grains themselves, sifted from Carolina Gold rice and funneled to enslaved Gullah Geechee cooks who turned discard into sustenance? Or with the recipe: classic tomato-laced Savannah red rice but with Gallic sausage instead of…oh, wait, do the French have a word for “non-corn grits”?

We’re sitting knee-to-knee at café tables at the jaunty Parisian sibling of Savannah, Georgia’s The Grey, that opened in July 2025 a few short blocks from the Musée d’Orsay. Ultimately, I opt for the easy route. “It’s un peu comme…un risotto?” I venture, in French as broken as the blown-out rice shards themselves. Mercifully, the dish soon lands on our table. Sometimes it’s best to let the food do the talking. Piping-hot and fragrant, these way-beyond-mid middlins swell in broth bursting with trinity aromatics and saucisse de Morteau porcine smoke. Nubs of sweet shrimp gleam pink against rust-red rice. Georgia tidewater meets the Jura mountains.

At the Savannah original, which occupies a restored Greyhound bus depot, chef Mashama Bailey and partner Johno Morisano have spent the past decade refining a deeply personal expression of African American foodways. The name L’Arrêt (French for bus stop) nods to that origin while staking new ground on the Left Bank. The concept represents both export and expansion: Bring that layered cooking to Paris and create space for conversation. Since winter, they’ve added Sunday salons on the Black Southern diaspora. Honestly, you feel that spirit in the room without the official programming.

On cue, a well-dressed six-top sweeps into the corner banquette. I can’t tell if they’re guest curators from the museum hosting friends from New York, or an all-Black reboot of Frasier set in Saint-Germain. The ringleader—Hermès scarf, booming baritone—gestures toward a brass greyhound on the shelf. “Does anyone know the story behind that?” he asks with a flourish.

Which is when my six-year-old wingman forgets he’s wearing headphones “IT’S GOOD, DADA! I GIVE IT A 9 OR MAYBE A 10!” Heads swivel. Smiles ripple. An easy grader, bless his heart. For me, the 18-month Comté mac-and-cheese shows up too prim and polite—especially for a €28 main. Happily, The Grey’s signature magic hums nearly everywhere else. Deviled eggs wear salmon roe like pearls. Cornbread lands with crackling edges. Braised pork collar glossed in peanut sauce with pickled onions nods to smothered chops, the peanut’s tangled diaspora, and Southern preservation traditions—yet reads as simply a beautiful plate of food. Bailey’s strength is that the layers of meaning are there if you want them, but the dishes stand perfectly well on their own.

Meanwhile, across the river another Southern power couple is staging a different kind of coup. If L’Arrêt is a conversation about memory and migration, La Bonbonnette, opened in late 2024, challenges Parisian wine orthodoxy head-on. Fanny and Patrick Panella—the Charleston duo behind Malagón and Chez Nous, both MICHELIN-recognized and fiercely beloved, and wine bar Bin 152—have tucked their new bar into a transitional stretch of the Marais. Not the glossy postcard blocks, but the in-between zone where bistros and cute boutiques give way to fluorescent-lit costume jewelry shops. The location echoes the Panellas’ knack for making destination dining out of streets that once required a leap of faith.

Their idea is deceptively simple: Treat great wine the way Americans increasingly do—as something to open casually, not ceremonially. In Paris, wine bars traditionally operate in a different register: apéro energy, natural-leaning glou-glou pours, modest price points. Serious bottles tend to stay parked at restaurants, where ordering one implies settling in for a full dinner. La Bonbonnette flips the equation.

The list runs deep and classical: cellar-worthy Burgundy, serious Rhône, and a few impeccably chosen bottles from Italy and the United States. But instead of anchoring those wines to a full restaurant meal, La Bonbonnette lets you approach them sideways. A glass of grand cru pinot noir with duck rillettes. An aged (2008!) vin jaune from Jura with Corsican coppa. Maybe cheese, maybe a tin of fish, maybe nothing at all.

That freedom reads as normal to American wine drinkers. “I’ll have a glass of that Hautes-Côtes de Beauuuune,” a woman at the bar drawled one night during one my early visits, sounding far more Mount Pleasant than Montmartre. Early on, the crowd skewed American. By this past December, the Southern cadences had company—more Parisians at the bar, more locals lingering over Burgundy outside. The place was settling into itself.

One restaurant group from Savannah serving hoppin’ john and hand pies within sight of the Seine. Another from Charleston pouring premier cru with nothing more obligatory than a mild thirst. Paris, famously protective of its culinary traditions, is discovering how good it feels to loosen the rules a bit—just the sort of regime change I can get on board with.

What to Order

Brillat-Savarin + Meursault at La Bonbonnette

There’s the palate-cleanser school of wine pairing. And then there’s pitting the most gloriously rich, velvet-textured triple-crème cheese against the most gloriously rich, velvet-textured white Burgundy (2022 Genot-Boulanger Clos du Cromin Meursault) and letting two grand divas wail wall-of-sound harmonies—clotted cream, hazelnut toast, butterfat-trough opulence—with just enough minerally green-apple acidity to keep things civilized.

Pecan Pie + Tawny Port at L’Arrêt

The French have been pairing walnut tart (tarte aux noix) with the honeyed, apricot sweetness of Sauternes forever. No argument here. But when staring down the business end of L’Arrêt’s classic Southern pecan pie, we like the dried fig, caramel, and vanilla-cherry notes—and gentle walnut-skin astringency—the Ramos Pinto Reserva tawny port brings to the conversation.