At the La Bagarre taqueria, in Paris, “the orange corn chips sing with the red of the pickled onions and the green of the coriander”

Qhen you walk around Mexico City, you always want to eat. Street food smells great in the morning. Street vendors sell tacos on every street corner, these thin corn pancakes wrapped around a filling with seemingly limitless possibilities. It’s delicious… and extremely addictive! Tacos al pastor are among the most popular. The pork roasts slowly on a spit. The recipe will be enhanced with a little pineapple for the fruity taste, and coriander, of course. The avocado ones are incredible too, because those fruits are exceptional there.

It is this effervescent culinary scene, both popular and refined, that inspired Elliot Lefèvre for his establishment La Bagarre, a taqueria ” French-style “ nestled in a small street in the Belleville district of Paris. Obsessed with eating local, Elliot Lefèvre does not use avocados, but creates surprising recipes with local products. His starter Comme un guacamole was suggested to him by the gastronome François-Régis Gaudry, who created a recipe based on broccoli. Elliot Lefèvre prepares, from this vegetable, an emulsion flavored with tahini, the Middle Eastern sesame cream.

Radiant, sunny, the dish is a real eye-catcher. The orange tones of the corn chips, or totopos, arranged in a crown sing with the red of the pickled onions and the green of the coriander on the light-skinned pseudo-guacamole. We start by biting into a totopo: the taste of there leaps on the taste buds. Very fatty and crunchy, the totopos come from Los Cuates, an artisanal tortilleria in Gâtinais. “Without them, I would not have opened my restaurant. They also produce the corn cakes essential for preparing tacos,” confides the thirty-year-old.

We immerse them in the creamy and tasty preparation. The taste of sunflower oil is very pronounced, enhanced with a hint of mustard. In addition to the pickles and coriander, everything is topped with fried shallots, an almost sweet bomb invented right next door, at La Parade, Elliot Lefèvre’s other restaurant. It’s not guacamole, but it’s also good. We accompany the dish with a glass of natural gamay and we do without mezcal.

Other recipes shake up the Belleville taqueria, such as this organic egg marinated in beet vinegar, homemade mayo and chipotle – a Mexican pepper with a slightly smoky taste. The meal is a spectacle, where the solos thought up by the creator follow one another: the warm corn velouté comforts like a dessert; the pork belly taco from Hauts-de-France, which can be eaten by hand while keeping it horizontal so as not to drop the sauce, is enhanced by the aromas of soy, nuoc-mâm, star anise and cinnamon; the vegan fondant chocolate cake completes the festival of tastes and colors. When Mexico City’s Zona Rosa meets Rue de l’Orillon with a little detour through Asia, represented by chef Yen Nhi Huynh, who is in charge of the kitchen, it’s surprising and tasty.