"It could be a village business, but it's in the Montorgueil district ! The proximity, the contact... we create links! That'spart of the life of a restaurant: you can come in at 5pm, two of them are there, eating a side of beef, others cakes: the beauty is that there's life, it's alive."
Les Artizans is the fusion of two crafts: patisserie and quality cuisine. It's the story of gourmandise, coupled with rigor, all mingled in the guets-apens of friends' tables, from the neighborhood or elsewhere. For 8 years now, it's been the success story of a duo of epicurean chefs: Pastry Chef Mathieu Mandard, co-founder and manager with Patrick Canal of the restaurant Les Artizans.
One, Mathieu, was born in Marseille and grew up in Savoie, and follows a classic pastry-making route, apprenticing for a CAP Pâtissier. He then embarked on a tour of France "among two or three references who are the best pastry craftsmen in France": Patrick Chevalot in Val d'Isère, and Philippe Segond in Aix-en-Provence. This led him to the Georges V in Paris, where he won the French Dessert Championship in 2004, before leaving for Russia to open the Café Pouchkine with Emmanuel Riou in Moscow, where he stayed for three years. Finally, he settled in France, where he opened my first patisserie, Art Macaron, and then, 8 years ago, Les Artizans.
The other, Patrick, is a Catalan chef from the Pyrenees. He also declares a classic apprenticeship, followed by 20 years in gastronomic restaurants: hotels, palaces, starred restaurants. This was followed by a stint in Paris bistros. Then, from one business to another, he moved to rue de Tournon in the 6th arrondissement, where he ran the place for 7 years, until he crossed paths with Mathieu.
And that's how the idea for the restaurant came about: Patrick had his business on rue de Tournon, Mathieu was just behind the Luxembourg Gardens on boulevard du Montparnasse. A mutual friend introduced them, and Mathieu offered to do the desserts for the restaurant - the Café Tournon, and one thing led to another: both the patisserie was too small for Mathieu, who wanted to do something else, and Patrick was also looking for other projects. So they decided to bring the two businesses together in one place.
The Artizans concept
"We called it Les Artizans, because pastry-making and cooking are both crafts. We wrote it with a Z for the first etymology of the word, in old French, the words Payzans, Artizans... were written with a Z. That's also why we chose the color blue for the restaurant, the blue of artisans."
As for the location, at 30 rue Montorgueil, nestled between the 1st and 2nd arrondissements, the two chefs explain, "it was pure chance, but in fact it took a very long time: here we battled for over two years to get the place. We looked everywhere, and we needed a place with two labs, big enough to accommodate both activities. We liked it here because of the street, which is beautiful and busy (sometimes dirty, laughs)." We have 55 covers downstairs, Salon upstairs 30, terrace for a large dozen places.
Added value...
The two key words are Gourmandise and Régularité: the regularity of gourmet delights, both sweet and savory. But also rigor, in the raw materials and in the kitchen, as if we were cooking at home. And the ambush!
...The human touch
We're there all the time, that's the life of a restaurant, a lot of people come to see us. We're not detached from the business, we're free, but we're here every day . If we're not here in the morning, we're here at midday, leaving at 2pm and coming back in the evening. In 8 years, we've built up relationships with a lot of customers we didn't know, so when we get a text saying, "We're here tonight", we don't force ourselves to come and see them!
We now have too many of these emblematic customers, the guet apens! We arrive at 2pm, the day's going well, we've got a lot of work to do, but the next day we haven't done a thing: all it takes is one furious table of 4 that turns into a table of 20 and lasts until 7pm, and some weirdo spraying the ceiling (editor's note: there was a champagne stain on the ceiling), and that doesn't stain the champagne (laughs). That's the life of a place! It could be an affair in a village or town, the Montorgueil district, all those who love the area know us, we do the same at other people's places, and friends from Corsica who arrive at 2pm and we do 6 hours of dining: we're constantly on the lookout!
We're the ones who wanted it to be a restaurant like a village, where proximity and contact create bonds, and that's part of the life of a restaurant: you can come in at 5pm, and two of them are there, eating a side of beef, others cakes: the beauty is that there's life, it's alive.
Was it also a choice linked to the diversity of the clientele in the Montorgueil district?
"That was the gamble here: we're opening a business for authentic bistro cuisine and high quality desserts, and at the same time, we're setting up in a street where there's a lot of restaurant business revolving around tourism and therefore more international gastronomy."
"When we arrived, we were the most expensive on the street and everyone was telling us it was too expensive, that we weren't going to make it, so we said we'll see! we arrived with a really different offer: if anything, the only one in the neighborhood that can come close to what we do, has a comparable offer and price in the end is Escargot, which is different all the same."
"At the beginning, like any business, it took us a year to get the machine up and running properly, but 8 years later I think we have a pretty nice panel of different customers: the inhabitants of the 1st, and there are still some who are discovering us, we have a lot of foreign tourists who come in, and then we have tourists from the provinces who are coming up. We've also got a great rugby network, so whenever there's a match in Paris, we get a lot of visitors.
An atypical offering: bistro cuisine and pastries
We knew the type of cuisine we wanted to offer, and we weren't going to make pizzas or crêpes: we wanted a fine wine list and quality pastries. The patisserie is doing wonderfully well, in the sense that we get incredible footfall in the street, which we see in the tearoom at weekends, and which we wouldn't have if we were in a godforsaken street in the 5th or 9th arrondissements.
On the other hand, people didn't necessarily read "Bistrot et Pâtisserie", even though you could tell it wasn't a classic patisserie. So, after 4 years, we redecorated and changed the position of the window display, which highlighted the pastries, because people thought it was just the cakes. So we reversed the bar and the pastry case, and since we've done that we've seen an overall increase in sales. It's added a lot to our catering business, and it's much clearer for customers.
Even after 8 years, we're constantly questioning ourselves: for example, we launched the buffet brunch 2 years ago. Lunch was always more irregular on winter Saturdays than in summer, and we knew that no one else on the street was serving buffet brunch. Today, we have 50 places for brunch, and it's going very well. We're revitalizing lunch on weekends, and we can serve two courses for 60 covers on Saturdays and 120 on Sundays, for example.
A constantly evolving menu, in line with the seasons and offers from producers..."
When we first opened, we offered a choice of starters, main courses and desserts, but we realized that this was running out of steam: now we have a set menu and an à l'ardoise menu, with seasonal produce from the market that we work with differently" Patrick explains: "I have meat suppliers from the Haute-Loire and Aubrac regions for very specific cuts of meat. After that, I work in the neighborhood with the Tribolet butcher's shop, which is a family-run bakery, a neighborhood butcher, so it's handy to have on hand for beef sides or ribeyes. Otherwise, I get duck from the southwest, pork from the Cantal and scallops direct from the Baie de Seine.
"We get a lot of producers to work directly with us. As foie gras is complicated this year, there isn't any, production has decreased, industrialists keep a lot for preserves. I buy whole fattened ducks to rework them, which lowers the cost, but you have to rework the whole duck afterwards."
A loyal clientele
What works for us is word-of-mouth. Food critics don 't understand our dual cuisine and patisserie offering, or tell us we've been here too long - they come if there's an opening or a big change - here they didn't know what they were going to talk about, cuisine or patisserie.
We've produced a culinary guide, but the other national guides get the cold shoulder, because they ask us every year if we want to pay. We don't like that, so we ask them, "You don't charge for Michelin-starred restaurants, but you do! In our opinion, these paper guides are pointless. We feed more people than the starred restaurants, our products are just as noble as those of the starred restaurants, our prices are lower, our standards are lower, but our clientele is at least as good.
Our communication is simple: we now have a person in charge who promotes the brunch, the cuisine, the pastries... We ' ve been here for 8 years, and we're now in a constant state of activity.
Meeting with Sortir à Paris journalists
Your journalists have visited Les Artizans several times over the past few years, first to discover the concept, then the brunch, and in particular the pastries made by chef Mathieu Mandar: the Bulliz puffs.
"The articles in Sortir à Paris about the brunch and the patisserie: it's a big hit! These articles helped us launch our brunch and logs: for example, if 15 new customers discover us one day, they'll taste them and talk about them all year long. It's rare for customers to tell us how they know us, except after an article in Sortir à Paris.
Especially since Sortir à Paris is practically the only media outlet that hasn't asked me to pay to be published.
Les Artizans, in development
"Of course, we have our sights set on going even further, but we're relieved to have a cruising speed with a great team, led by venue manager Anaïs (editor's note: also sister of Mathieu Mandar, pictured at the top of this article)." "For the moment we're happy here, we've got our other project after us."
Patrick sets up gîtes in his family home in the Pyrenees, near Font Romeu, on the border. But he likes to breathe in the fresh air as well as eating out. Mathieu has his own choux pastry concept, Bulliz', with a store on rue d'Hauteville and another on rue Richerand. Everything is produced here, in Les Artizans, so his goal is to relocate production and sell it elsewhere, in 2024.
A message to pass on to the Parisians of today and tomorrow?
"We'll be here, even during the Olympics, in July or August, it won't change a thing. We understand people's concerns about prices, but they don't realize it: they look at their own shopping. Nobody has the same prices as they did two years ago, so restaurant owners have to pass on the price increases too, otherwise we can't go on."
"For the organization of the Olympic Games, we're being asked to make a lot of adaptations, we're thinking differently, we're finding solutions, but it's a real worry. For example, deliveries are shifted to the night: for all night deliveries (from 10pm to 7am) we have to get organized. So we have more constraints than advantages, which we can't put a figure on today, but we're still not sure we'll be able to make normal sales."
Support from the city of Paris
"But we need real cooperation from the town hall of the two arrondissements; Sunday is the biggest day for shopkeepers and, paradoxically, it's the day when there are the most cars, the street isn't cleaned at the right time: there 's a lack of synergy, we're asking for tolerance, especially in fine weather - we wonder where the support for shopkeepers is sometimes. Entrepreneurship in Paris is gratifying, but we have to keep making the next generation want to move in!"
Discover original articles from Sortir à ParisLes Bûches de Noël des Artizans 2021 by Matthieu Mandard
Les Artizans, the famous Montorgueil bistro, presents its Christmas creations. Here we have a beautiful, exceptional log in collaboration with artist Thierry Martenon: "Less is More", and divine rolled creations. [Read more]
Les Bûches de Noël des Artizans 2021 by Matthieu Mandard
