JERRY ZOLYNSKY
NOSH
From
Russia Bistro Le Bliss serves Eastern European fare with a French twist. ASHLEY ZLATOPOLSKY CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Y
akov Fleysher made his first soup when he was just 5 years old. The owner and executive chef of West Bloomfield’s Bistro Le Bliss, which fuses traditional Eastern European fare with French cuisine, boiled orange peels with different ingredients. The then-5-year-old, who grew up in the former Soviet Union in a small city 20 miles outside of Riga, Latvia, called
Ogre, fed the soup to his father. “My dad ate it, and he liked it,” he recalls with a laugh. Encouraged by the response, Fleysher, now 42, continued to cook. By the age of 16, he was regularly flipping and serving up blinchiki, or thin Russianstyle crepes for his family. “Whenever someone wanted crepes, I was supposed to make them,” he says. “Cooking was in my DNA.”
Chef puts the finishing touches on his food before it is sent out.
Fleysher’s great-grandmother was a chef. His great-grandfather also operated a kosher butcher shop. “Before the Soviets came to Latvia, my family was making kosher food and kosher meat for Jewish people,” he explains. “I was inspired by them.” He likens his lifelong passion for cooking and the art of food to the Sanskrit word of “samsara,” a fundamental belief that life is cyclical and that all living beings are reborn. “I knew all my life I was ready to cook,” Fleysher says. “Life led me to it. It’s just the way it was.”
JERRY ZOLYNSKY
A NEW FUTURE As Bistro Le Bliss, which will celebrate three years in operation this August, gets ready to welcome a recently secured liquor license, Fleysher is already cooking up creative plans for how to remodel the restaurant to accommodate a new bar and eating area. He also has new dishes in the works that follow Bistro
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Le Bliss’ traditional style of incorporating unusual ingredients into beautifully arranged plates. The restaurant plans to begin selling charbroiled sturgeon, roasted beet and herring tartare, and beef and herring carpaccio. “They’re Eastern European with a French influence,” Fleysher says of the upcoming menu options. Yet these dishes aren’t easy to make; the chef and restaurant owner spends weeks, sometimes longer, developing and fine-tuning recipes. “It’s trial and error,” he continues. “Every day, you think about your inspirations and create new combinations from them. After several tries, you come up with the perfect combination.” It’s a practice that Fleysher has refined in his 37 years of cooking. From his early years living behind the Iron Curtain to the culinary career that he built from the ground up in the United States, the self-taught
