It was the predecessor to his more iconic Chez Haynes, which he opened in 1964 by the time Chez Haynes closed in 2009, it was the oldest American restaurant in Paris. The latter belonged to Leroy Haynes, a Black American GI who stayed in Paris after the end of World War II and opened the restaurant with his first wife, a French woman named Gabrielle Lecarbonnier. The postwar Paris that Baldwin knew had a handful of soul food restaurants, places like Chez Inez, which Baldwin visited, and Gabby and Haynes. Though chicken and waffles may be an unfamiliar combination for many European diners, soul food has had a home in Paris for as long as jazz has. Her friend Najat, who has ordered the same thing, takes a bite, looks at me, and says, “It’s perfect.” Gumbo Yaya’s fried chicken and waffles, macaroni and cheese, and biscuit “It’s sirop d’érable!” she says, correctly identifying the sauce as maple syrup. She eats the fry and then lets out a small exclamation of surprise.
It’s her first experience with soul food, and she seems unsure of how to react to the waffle-as-bun concept of her fried chicken sandwich. The restaurant’s small interior is closed off because of COVID-19, and though some diners are eating at the few well-spaced picnic tables that have been placed outside, there’s also a continuous line of people ordering takeaway.Īt one of the tables next to me, Zoé, a 23-year-old medical student from Grenoble, gingerly picks up a fry and dips it into a small container of unknown sauce. Located in one of the city’s last remaining (relatively) affordable neighborhoods, Gumbo Yaya proudly advertises itself as “Soul Food” and a “Southern Kitchen” on its facade, which looks out onto a miniature cobbled plaza. The tiny restaurant’s red facade bursts through the otherwise grayish nook it occupies at the northeastern edge of Paris’s 10th Arrondissement, just streets away from the French Communist Party’s curving, concrete, Oscar Niemeyer-designed headquarters.
I’m thinking about these lines as I bite into a piece of fried chicken - the thinly breaded skin crispy, the inside juicy enough that I need to wipe my lips - while sitting in front of Gumbo Yaya. “But,” he added just a page or two later, “I had missed my brothers and my sisters … I missed Harlem Sunday mornings and fried chicken and biscuits.”
“In the years in Paris, I had never been homesick for anything American,” James Baldwin wrote in his 1972 book of essays, No Name in the Street.