New York City is a gastronomical paradise, with more than 20,000 restaurants spread across the city. According to reports, there are so many restaurants within the five boroughs of the city that one could eat at a different one every day and still not have tried them all 12 years later.
Despite the recession last year, a French restaurant opened its doors in the NoLIta (North of Little Italy) neighborhood downtown. Foodies and francophiles found this neighborhood gem and promptly fell in love.
What’s not to love?
Tartinery is an industrial French café with a cozy ambience in a great neighborhood. Over and above all that, they serve the best open-faced sandwiches in town called tartines. What makes Tartinery’s tartine different from the others is the Polaine bread, flown in daily from Paris and not available anywhere else in the city.
Located along a stretch of Mulberry Street, Tartinery is the brainchild of French-Filipino Stephan Jauslin and two of his French friends— Nicolas Dutko and Maxime Paul.
Stephan is the only child of French hotelier Michel Jauslin and Filipina model Ilma Gallardo who met and fell in love in Manila when Michel was working as an Assistant Food and Beverage Manager at the Hyatt.
Filipino French Connection
“They were endlessly teased by our group of models until they finally went out for dinner.... and the rest is history,” shared former Balenciaga model Bessie Badilla, a friend and contemporary of Jauslin’s mom.
Stephan’s parents got married and they lived in Nice. After five years, they were blessed with a son, Stephan who was born in Geneva. Unfortunately, tragedy struck when Ilma died due to wrong medication for an asthma attack.
Stephan back then was barely a year old. He grew up not knowing a whole lot about his mother. His dad would tell him stories about how they met and about how wonderful his mother was.
Through the social networking site Facebook, Stephan’s father Michel got reconnected with Bessie and when she found out that Stephan is already based in New York, she looked for him and introduced herself as a good friend of his mother’s.
Knowing that there was a huge void left in Stephan’s life when his mother died, Bessie made a project, a book on the life and times of Ilma Gallardo-Jauslin as she was remembered by her friends and colleagues in the industry. Last year, Bessie gave the book to an emotional Stephan.
“I really, really enjoyed reading it. It was very emotional for me to go through that. It was a great gift that Tita Bessie gave. I like to savor reading through the stories and the comments and discovering a part of me that I don’t really know,” he said.
For Bessie, it was something that she felt she was compelled to do.
“There were lots of fun stories and anecdotes about Ilma that I felt her son needed to know. One time, she joined a pageant and she was called in the top 10 as a semi-finalist but she wouldn’t come out onstage. Hinimatay na pala sa nerbiyos, (“She fainted because she was very nervous”)” Bessie shared.
Through time, Stephan lost touch with his mother’s side of the family. They moved from Israel to Brussels to South Korea and back to France because of his father’s hotel job. Now, Stephan looks forward to revisiting the Philippines someday to meet with his mom’s relatives again. He was about 11 years old when he last visited the country.
Tartinery
Stephan was a student at the École Hotelière, a hospitality management school in Lausanne, Switzerland when he met his future business partners Nicolas and Maxime.
“We used to talk about starting our own business but after we graduated, we began doing different things. I was doing graduate school, Maxime was helping his family business and Nicolas was traveling the world. We got together one day and talked about opening a restaurant in New York,” Stephan shared.
Then they started from scratch. With a business plan, they looked for investors and searched for a space. By March last year, they opened their doors and welcomed customers who savored their tartines.
So what exactly is a tartine?
In basic terms, it is an open-faced sandwich. At Tartinery, they use the Poilane bread as base and the freshest ingredients possible. “As I mentioned, we limit ourselves to four or five ingredients and really bring out the flavors,” explained Jauslin.
“The Poilane bread is the quintessential French bread. It is our ultimate bread of choice, although our guests can also order multi-grain or gluten-free. It’s a pretty big, sourdough loaf, slightly acidic and very tasty,” he shared.
It so happens that Stephan and his partners are childhood friends of Apollonia Poilane (grand-daughter of the baker who started Pain Poilane) who was happy to help them ship the bread to New York overnight. The loaves are baked at 8pm in the Poilane factory in Bievre, located in the suburbs of Paris, leave the airport at 12am and are delivered in New York before 8am the next day.
Initially, they asked around a dozen bakers to come up with their own versions of the bread but everyone fell short. This was when they decided to import the bread directly from France.
With more than 10 tartines on the menu, multiple guests have the option to mix and match, or order the sandwiches tapas-style for sharing.
“We wanted something relatively new, that we had a potential to develop,” he added, “New York is really a tough place for restaurants so we really had to be unique. What people know here of French cuisine is the fine dining and very formal kind. We wanted to showcase the less formal side of French dining.”
Together with three friends, we had a field day exploring the restaurant and tasting the delicious tartines. We chatted with Stephan and he was very helpful in explaining the various kinds of tartines they offered.
We opted to get the best-sellers.
The Poulet Roti (roast farm chicken, homemade herbed mayo, shaved fennel, olive oil), Croque Monsieur and Croque Madame are some of the most popular tartines at Tartinery.
My personal favorite was the Foie Gras tartine, which consists of homemade duck foie gras with a touch of salt and fig jam. Then there was Crotin tartine (goat cheese, frisée, fresh thyme, honey, olive oil) and the tartare tartine (steak tartare, onions, capers, French Dijon, worcestershire, egg yolk, topped with four potato crisps).
It was great to visit the place with fellow foodies and we swapped stories and anecdotes as we shared our tartines.
As a French bistro, Tartinery has also been serving salads, soups, wine, fresh juices and pastries. The concept, Stephan explains, is simplicity. From going back to basics in the ingredients – using 4 to 5, instead of 10 to 12 – to the restaurant’s decor, indeed it is all about simplicity.
Exposed brick walls, black metal grid and tables, blackboards that bear the menu, these are but few of the restaurant’s signature marks. Visit the downstairs dining area and enjoy the centerpiece, a large tree in the dead center of an eaight-seat square table.
For weekend brunch and lunch, Tartinery offers diners their choice of eggs with bacon, mushrooms and a number of other toppings on the same Poilane bread, combined with fresh soup of the day and salad.
The restaurant also has an assortment of pastries, croissants, baguettes with butter, and La Colombe coffee. There are also a couple of dessert tartines like the banana and nutella, which became an instant favorite.
Stephan is totally a hands-on man and since they opened last year, he has been religiously working seven days a week.
“When you open a restaurant, you do everything to make it work. I’m here at 8 in the morning. I do the finances, operations and paper work. I also help out with the service when it gets really busy. We close up around midnight and I get home around 1:00 am,” he said.
Then he sleeps. By 7am, he is awake and the cycle repeats.
For the 26-year-old entrepreneur, it is all about rising to the challenge.
“If you are really confident with what you have, then you need to try it because you’re never going to find out unless you try. Most big successes come from small ideas. Statistics say that 2 out of 3 restaurants in New York go out of business within three years but that didn’t deter us because we have an ultimate goal and we are working hard to attain that,” he said.
(www.asianjournal.com)
(NYNJ Feb 18-24, 2011 LifeEASTyle pg. 2)
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