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Joshua Foulquier Built a Restaurant Around the Art His Mother Loved

Chez Fifi, a bistro tucked into an Upper East Side townhouse, is a portrait of a woman drawn from the objects and the instincts she bequeathed her sons.

The art at Chez Fifi, David and Joshua Foulquier’s bistro tucked into an Upper East Side townhouse was not curated in the conventional sense but rather inherited. The brothers, cofounders of the We All Gotta Eat group, named the restaurant for their mother—Firouzeh “Fifi” Foulquier—a stylish Iranian refugee who arrived in New York in the 1970s and settled just a few blocks from where it now stands. Though its menu is shaped by French and Basque influences, the ambiance is all Fifi. According to Joshua Foulquier, the candles on the tables were hers. The pillows on the banquettes were hers. Chez Fifi’s playlist comes from a box labeled “dinner party CDs” that he found under his mother’s bed after she passed away in 2018; it plays every night, untouched. And on the wall are works by Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder, Joan Miró and other artists that she collected over decades.

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“In the salon........

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