Two days after the St Denis siege, a Paris morning in the rain. The mood is subdued except at Joël Thiébault’s market stall where immaculately coiffured Paris matrons are jostling for the finest vegetables. The stall cascades with colour: fragrant flowering herbs, six styles of winter radish, six varieties of carrots, stunning spinach: “le prince de legumes”. Thiébault supplies Pierre Gagnaire and Hélène Darroze in London and many of the top chefs in Paris including Greg Marchand, chef-patron of Frenchie in the garment district near Les Halles. Marchand is used to buying the best produce in France and is a little concerned about suppliers for the Covent Garden branch of Frenchie he is opening on 2 February.
Marchand knows London well, perhaps as well as Paris, having worked here for much of his 20s: at the Savoy Grill, the Mandarin Oriental, the Electric and as head chef at Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen. It was Oliver who christened him Frenchie and whom he credits with his passion for produce and running a business. “I am lucky to have worked with successful people: Nick Jones, Jamie Oliver and Danny Meyer,” he says. “From Jamie I learnt about respect for ingredients, relationships with suppliers, relationships with staff.” The first dish Marchand cooked was escalope normande at his orphanage in Nantes when the chef had the weekend off. Marchand’s widowed mother had died when he was 12. He stood out, he says, with his long hair but the tougher kids protected him. He started culinary school at 16 and left the orphanage a year later. “Cooking was more about survival than anything else,” he says. “My passion came later. I had other things to sort out in life.”
This would happen here. After a short spell in a Peebles hotel, Marchand came south aged 20. “My life opened in a whole new world,” he says. “This is why London is so interesting for me. It is where I discovered myself as an independent person. It is where I rebuilt myself.”
After a brush with depression (“It is gone now, though when you have it once...”) and a stint in Spain, he returned to work for Jones then Oliver, before heading to the US for a year at Gramercy Tavern.
Marchand liked New York but Marie, his super-smart girlfriend and soon-to-be-wife, was pregnant and keen to return to Paris. It was September 2008, Marchand was 30. He had no job, little money but was determined to open his own place. It seems simple now from his buzzing wine bar in Rue de Nil.
Frenchie opened on 1 April, 2009, and was an almost instant critical and commercial smash. Offering smart but simple food in a less smart and simple room, Marchand rode the crest of the new bistronomy movement along with Le Chateaubriand. The wine bar followed, then Frenchie to Go with bacon sandwiches, pastrami, fish and chips, hot dogs, pulled pork – London and New York street food with a French cheffy twist. There is now a Frenchie wine shop alongside his friends’ butchery, fish shop, fruit and veg store, a coffee boutique and a soon-to-be-opened bakery. Marchand is his own one-man Maltby Street.
And now, of course, London. I scope the Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, site with Marchand, Marie and Emily Bonaventure, their architect. It is a bright, light space that will serve bistronomy plates with a smart Parisian-style bar.
As James Lowe at Shoreditch’s Michelin-starred Lyle’s says: “He has flair and not just when cooking. It’ll be nice for someone to show us how to do a wine bar properly.”
In contrast to some of his contemporaries, Marchand “gets” London and the way it works. “This is part of me, a city where I feel at home,” he says. “We have an apartment in Neal Street, around the corner. For 10 years I followed my knife skills. Now I am raising two Parisian kids. What am I going to give them from me? London.”
I’ll leave the last word to Jamie Oliver: “I’m so excited that Greg – or Frenchie, as I’ve always called him – is opening a restaurant in London,” he writes me in an email. “Frenchie has always kept one foot in the UK’s food scene. When his new place opens, I’ll definitely be first in line.” I suspect there will be a queue in Covent Garden early next month and he may have to beat me to it.
Frenchie opens on 2 February at 16 Henrietta St, London WC2E 8QH; frenchiecoventgarden.com; 020 7836 4422
