How Did That Joan Miró Get There?

Welcome back to How Did That Get There?, a monthly column by Annie Armstrong about how fine artworks end up out of museums and into restaurants around the world. Last month, we got the inside story of how chef Ned Baldwin’s friendship with Barbara Gladstone had everything to do with opening Houseman, yet nothing to do with the Joan Jonas work that lives there. This month, Joshua Foulquier introduces us to the Fifi that inspired Chez Fifi and its vibrant art collection.

Though Chez Fifi was opened and is run by a brother act, two matriarchs oversee most of what goes on in the restaurant. One is Pouran Aryeh, the grandmother of Joshua and David Foulquier, who was immortalized in a 1970 portrait while wearing her pearls, a leopard print coat, and a thick swish of black eyeliner. She peers through it now in perpetuity, keeping watch of the Upper East Side restaurant’s second floor, nicknamed the Salon. She is flanked by two artworks, a gouache by Alexander Calder, and an etching by Joan Miró. The Calder was sourced by her grandson Josh, and the Miró, by her daughter Firouzeh, nicknamed Fifi, who is also memorialized in the restaurant as an artwork—a minimalist drawing by the bar, as well as the objects and artworks she collected throughout her life, which found a second home in Chez Fifi after her passing in 2018. 

“The restaurant defines my mother better than any biography or eulogy ever could,” Josh Foulquier told me. The Miró is an especially prized piece from her collection, not only for its value but for how its appearance embodies her spirit. “It’s the way that the colors and the brush strokes interact, the painting is dancing and is almost exploding off of the edges of the paper,” he said. The colors evoke the palette she used to decorate the apartment the brothers grew up in just three blocks away from what is now Chez Fifi. “It was above my couch since the day I was born, and so I had a lot of time to look at it.”