In the 11th, Trâmette Splits Day and Night as Locomal Opens Nearby
Two new kitchens have opened within blocks of each other in Paris's eleventh arrondissement this season: Trâmette, running as a canteen by day and an izakaya by night beside its sister restaurant, and Locomal, a taqueria that has taken over the former Mokoloco space.
At noon on a weekday in the eleventh arrondissement, before the tables have been reset for evening and while most of the neighborhood is still at work, the kitchen beside Trâm 130 is not the same kitchen it will be nine hours later, because Trâmette, which opened this month under chef Priscilla Trâm, was built from the start to hold two identities inside one room, a canteen at midday, simple plates and sandwiches for people with forty minutes and somewhere to be after, and by evening an izakaya, small plates, sake, wine, for people with nowhere they need to be at all.
Then the tray arrives.
It arrives differently depending on the hour, which is the entire point: the same hands, the same pass, the same address, but a different warp threaded onto the same loom depending on whether the sun is up. The sister restaurant next door supplies the through-line, the pattern that repeats, a family recipe for what a kitchen owes its neighborhood at different hours of the same day, rewoven each time without ever being rewritten.
A few streets over, a different thread ties into the same cloth. Locomal opened this summer in the space that had belonged to Mokoloco, a taqueria from chef José Oviedo, who spent his earlier years at El Nopal before setting up his own loom. From five in the afternoon there is a happy hour of tacos and drinks; from seven, the full menu opens, ceviche, asada, and tacos built on tomato pulp rather than the fillings a taco is expected to carry.
Five o'clock exactly.
Two kitchens, two clocks, and the same knot tying both of them to the neighborhood they sit in, a dye that does not wash out, a pattern that only shows itself in the changing of the light. Whoever sits down at noon at one address and at five at the other is not eating two restaurants. They are eating the same hour of the same district, twice, dyed a different color each time it comes back around.