Cashing in on Pinoy food cravings
French-born Filipina and college buddy build a Filipino eatery from the ground up for homesick Filipinos at the heart of Paris
THE next generation of migrant Filipinos are living it — the callback aromas and flavors of the motherland rising from the streets of their adopted country.
This is the case for Jessica Gonzalez, co-founder of Bobi Paris, the fun and relaxed Filipino food eatery at the heart of Paris, France.
Gonzalez was born in France to Filipino parents. Now 34 years old, the chemist by training cooks Filipino dishes in Bobi’s kitchen.
Filipino food has been the darling of some fine dining chefs the world over, but Gonzalez and her business partner Aurélie are unique in celebrating the casual, convivial side of it.
The bistro vibe of Bobi catches up with the quotidian realities of eating in the homeland.
Bobi is a spin-off of boui-boui, the French term for a small eatery.
Think of something similar to the street food stalls of Vietnam where the late Anthony Bourdain dined with former US president Barack Obama.
In the Philippines, this has a name of its own: the carinderia or the turo-turo.
Casual, normal dining, it’s what Gonzalez and Aurélie stand for.
“My worst fear is that people come here and they are not at ease,” Gonzalez said.
And being at ease means sending up Occidental dining etiquette, which could be intimidating for Filipinos visiting France.
Bobi offers the Kamayan for two, a scaled boodle fight with the usual suspects: inihaw na liempo, chicken inasal, barbecue, shrimps, vegetables and (naturally) rice arrayed on a banana leaf and surrounded by Filipino condiments.
Eating with hands is the biggest cultural outlier among the gastronomic exports of the Philippines to France.
Offering this on the menu is a big leap considering the penury of Filipino gastronomic representation in the French city.
Gonzalez and Aurélie wanted to create something “that looks like us, that showcases who we are.”
Aurélie is from Madagascar, but their friendship goes way back, permitting an identity mirroring.
“We share the same values, principles,” Gonzalez said. Those were framed by their common education: both hold degrees in Chemistry. Gonzalez pursued a master’s degree in marketing and Aurélie in business development.
“We had no idea at the time that we would be entrepreneurs, yet,” Gonzalez thought back.
She was still trying her hand in the cosmetics industry. “But with all the jobs I had, it became clear [the cosmetics industry] wasn’t for me.”
Aurélie liked Filipino culture and food.
“At the time there was no Filipino restaurant. When we wanted to eat [it] outside, we couldn’t,” Gonzalez recalled. So they opened Bobi three months toward the end of 2019, not knowing they were cooking straight into the Covid-19 pandemic.
The precursor to the mayhem that was the global health crisis were Paris’ structural pauses to “business as usual.”
Transport strikes and rallies (the famous manifs) are a way of life, an inevitable feature of Frenchness that the young owners of Bobi had to be logistically prepared for on the regular.
Their beginnings, just two weeks after opening, contended with such events interrupting foot traffic into their establishment.
“There was no metro, no transportation at all,” Gonzalez recalled, citing the world renowned convenient rail system of the city. “Everything froze in Paris.”
The strikes did not let up, even as Covid-19 crept in. Paris in quarantaine (in fact the root of the word quarantine) would have been the most striking scene of the dystopian nightmare for food and restauration: terrasse dining was shot, the brasseries and restaurants were shut.
Gonzalez would now chalk up their survival to their teamwork and independence.
“Aurélie would be in front of the house, and I’m in charge of the kitchen and the creativity and marketing, so we managed to work just the two of us during Covid.”
They were not dependent on a chef who had to commute to work.
There would be intermissions of “normalcy” amid the scares and lockdowns.
“We managed to stay open and be visible to people on social media,” she said. And they marched on until the fog lifted and a fugue of success settled in its wake.
Now, the Filipino tourists — Bobi’s main market — are back. “We noticed that Filipinos visiting Paris would be really homesick by the end of their trip,” she said. “So they come to us. Which means a lot to me because the main goal was to really introduce Filipino culture and cuisine to the French, but I also wanted to create a place where Pinoys would feel at home.”
It’s the coziest clash of civilizations. Gonzalez and Aurélie wanted to straddle both worlds, and the cosmopolitan crowds obliged. It feels true to Paris’ renown as a catchment of worldly adventurers, shoving liempo and rice into their mouths with their fingers, along the jaunty lines of Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast” in the 1920s.
Gonzalez and Aurélie’s Frenchness in their adoptive country is channeled into another inevitable glue binding Paris to its tourists and inhabitants: the café.
The continued success of Bobi permitted them to expand into Kapé at rue de Malte, 11th arrondissement.
"We noticed that Filipinos visiting Paris would be homesick by the end of their trip. So they come to us. Which means a lot to me because the main goal was to really introduce Filipino culture and cuisine to the French, but I also wanted to create a place where Pinoys would feel at home.”