Grave

Romain Détriché

How did this place come about and what made it different from the start?
Grave came out of an unlikely meeting between two very different paths. Nico had been a notary, and I came from design. I’d worked in fashion, most recently at Courrèges, Rabanne, and Icicle. We both wanted to build something tangible, something rooted in the everyday.

The name says a lot about the intention. In French, grave has two lives: it means serious, weighty, considered, but in slang it’s also the strongest form of approval, something like “absolutely” or “totally.” You’d say c’est grave bon the way someone might say, “This is seriously good.” We liked that tension. The place had to earn both meanings: rigorous enough to be taken seriously, good enough that people just say grave.

The idea was never to open just another café. It was to create a place that genuinely belonged to its neighbourhood, where the same level of care went into the coffee, the pastry, and the space itself.

From the start, we refused to choose between rigour and accessibility. The coffee is serious, the pastries are made in-house, but the place stays simple and unpretentious. Maybe that’s what made Grave different: a certain density packed into a very small format.

What part of the day, space, or creative process do those who work here enjoy the most?
Personally, the part of the day I value most is the early morning, before the first customers arrive, when the space is quiet and the pastry work begins. There’s something very focused about that moment: testing a new recipe, adjusting a texture, figuring out why something didn’t hold the way it should. It’s where most of the creative decisions actually happen, not in a brainstorm, but in the middle of doing.

As for the space itself, I think what the team appreciates most is the counter, that long, narrow bar that runs the length of the room. It forces a kind of closeness with the customer that you don’t get in bigger places. Conversations happen naturally there. You’re not behind a machine, you’re alongside someone.

If someone is coming in for the first time, what should they not miss?
The coffee first. That’s the foundation of everything. But if you’re coming for the first time, I’d say don’t leave without trying whatever is on the cold counter that day. The pastry programme is where a lot of our energy goes, and it changes with the seasons. We’ve had things like a Basque cheesecake with spiced chai, cookies with sea salt chocolate ganache, and mochi banana bread. There’s always something that shouldn’t work on paper but does.

And if it’s the right season, the soft serve. We run it through a Carpigiani, so the texture is denser and more intense than what you’d expect. It’s become one of those things people come back for specifically.

More broadly, though: slow down. The space is small, the counter is right there. Let yourself get drawn into a conversation you didn’t plan on having.

What has been an interesting challenge that has made you rethink something about the project?
The space itself was the first real constraint, and probably the most formative one. Grave is extremely small. No kitchen to speak of, no extraction ventilation, no back-of-house to hide in. Everything has to be thought through before it arrives: what we make, how we store it, how it holds on the counter. That forced a kind of discipline in the pastry programme that I don’t think we would have developed otherwise. Limitations became a design tool.

The deeper challenge has been growth itself, not in a dramatic way, but the quiet pressure of going from something very instinctive to something that has to be consistent every single day. When a place starts to work, people come back with expectations. That’s a good thing, but it means you can’t rely on spontaneity anymore. It pushed us to be more intentional about what Grave actually is, what’s non-negotiable, and what can evolve. You can’t scale instinct. You have to sit down, name things, and make sure the people around you understand not just what to do, but why.

What influence, idea, or reference continues to shape the way you work today?
From the very beginning, the reference we kept coming back to wasn’t another coffee shop. It was the neighbourhood bistro. That place that’s been there forever, where the owner knows your name, where you don’t need a reason to stop in. We wanted Grave to have that kind of presence in the street: somewhere that belongs to the people who live around it, not just to people who seek it out on a list.

That idea still shapes everything: how we talk to customers, how we think about the menu, and how we approach the space. A great neighbourhood café isn’t trying to impress you. It’s just reliably, quietly good. The coffee culture references are there, the pastry craft is there, but they’re in service of something more ordinary and more durable: a place that’s simply part of someone’s day and never makes you feel like a stranger.

What place, project, or person has inspired you recently and why?
I/O in the 3rd has been a real reference for how seriously you can approach coffee without losing the warmth of a neighbourhood spot. There’s a technical rigour there that’s inspiring, the kind of place that’s been doing it properly for long enough that it feels settled and confident. It doesn’t need to shout. That kind of longevity is something we think about a lot.

And then Candle Kid in the 20th, which is closer to what we aspire to in terms of relationship with the neighbourhood. It’s genuinely woven into the fabric of the area. People don’t go there to discover something; they go there because it’s theirs. That quiet sense of belonging to a street, a community, a daily rhythm, that’s the hardest thing to build and the thing we measure ourselves against every single day.

If your space could invite someone to collaborate for a day, who would it be and what would you do together?
My grandmothers. Both of them. No hesitation.

They were great cooks and even greater hosts, the kind of women who could feed fifteen people and make every single one of them feel like the most important guest at the table. That combination of elegance, generosity, and humour is honestly the thing we’re always chasing at Grave, even if we’d never quite put it in those words before.

The day would be a full service, their way. They’d be in charge of the rhythm, the welcome, the mood. And on the counter, their recipes: a Grand Marnier sorbet, a proper eggnog served as a drink. The things that defined Sunday lunches and childhood celebrations. We’d just be there to learn, to watch how they move, how they talk to people, and how they make a room feel like home.

There’s a kind of hosting that has nothing to do with hospitality as an industry. It’s older than that, more intimate, more human, the kind you can’t learn from a manual, only from watching someone who’s been doing it.

Is there an object, corner or detail of the place that has a story that few people know?
The detail that stayed with me most came from a customer. He’d been coming in since we opened, and one day he told us that he remembered this exact address from the 1950s and ’60s. It used to be a toy shop, where his father would bring him to pick out gifts. He said it with this very quiet smile, like he was somewhere else for a moment.

The space holds more stories than we put into it, and every time that customer comes in for his coffee, we’re reminded that what we do here is just the latest chapter of a much longer story.

If this project were a city, a book, or a record, which would it be and why?
Honestly? We think that’s a question for our customers. Everyone who walks through that door seems to experience Grave slightly differently. Some people find it meditative, some find it social, some just come for the cookie and leave happy. We’d hate to close that down with one answer.

So our answer is: come in, have a coffee, sit with it for a moment. You’ll know.