1001 Tunisie: How would you define your restaurant Bô’M?
Malek Labidi: the uninhibited Bô’M is a place where people come with friends, colleagues or family on Sunday to enjoy inventive cuisine based on local, seasonal, fresh products.
I wanted this restaurant to be my kitchen image: unique, fresh, high in flavor, surprising!
The restaurant offers a hundred covered (80 indoors and 20 outside) and we are a team of 16 people: 7 kitchen, 8 indoor and myself. I also have a colleague who works only on our public relations.

It is rare in Tunisia that the restaurant owner is also chef? What is your background ?
I have always been passionate about food, cooking. After graduating from Management Sciences in Paris, I went to the Institut Paul Bocuse in Lyon. This is an international standard business school in the field of Hospitality, Catering and Culinary Arts.
After various experiences abroad including the Plaza Athenee Alain Ducaste and Tunisia, I decided to open my own restaurant I am both owner and manager.

What can you eat in Bô’M and how your does your restaurant mark itself out?
The Bô’M is a place I want without fuss where people come to eat fine cuisine, innovative and healthy products based on quality and season. All this at affordable prices (23DT the all inclusive menu). Our menu is deliberately limited and our service is based on formulas of the menu “business lunch”, the “Formula 15h-20h” for late lunches, savory gourmet breaks or cravings for sweets, and “Formula brunch” for long Sunday matinees with family, friends or lovers!
For example, the phrase “Business Lunch” offers lunch menu 2 starters, 2 mains, 2 desserts which changes every two days. Everything is served in 40 minutes by attentive and professional staff.

Bô’M cuisine focuses on freshness, seasonality of Tunisian products. Our challenge is to surprise our customers with good poultry farmer tender desire, products that exist in Tunisia but we have not traditionally used to cook like asparagus, chanterelles, red fruits but also the red tuna, monkfish … It is to reveal the taste of these products, to sublimate their flavors for fine cuisine. The challenge is for us to reinvent ourselves every other day because our menu changes according to this periodicity.

What are the products without which you could not go in the kitchen?
I do not really have to hand key products except for olive oil but it is obvious in Tunisia! My card is based on quality products that I find in the central market or in some small neighborhood markets. I work a lot the seasonality of products. Currently, for example, I search and cuisine, among others, asparagus, citrus fruits, blueberries, medlar.

Interview by A.M.

The Bô’M
Complex Bab el Bouhaira (right next to the Lake Club) – Main Avenue du Lac
Les Berges du Lac 1
Phone : (+216) 27 951 777 – Facebook Page