Its bright colors brighten up the glaucous and aging Gros-Chêne slab that overlooks it. Since a few weeks, the restaurant Nuggets! took place at the foot of the Maurepas towers in Rennes. In this popular district located in the north of the city, the culinary offer has been limited until now to pizzas, kebabs or burgers. At Pépites!, the cuisine is “organic, local, seasonal and affordable”, underlines Delphine Robin, the room manager. In this place where flavors mingle, the project is also social.
Modeled on other back-to-work restaurants that have emerged in France, Pépites! accompanies people far from employment to enable them to integrate professionally into the hotel and catering trades. Two servers thus joined the team on a CDI (fixed-term integration contract) a few days ago. David Rault is one of the rookies. Aged 36, this sturdy guy worked in the restaurant business for a long time before health problems ruined his career. “I found myself at one point unemployed,” he says. But I managed to pick up the thread thanks to my social referent. I first worked as a companion at Emmaüs before joining Pépites! “.
Change the image of the neighborhood
Here, employment contracts never exceed two years. “The time to put these people back in the saddle and build a professional project with them,” says Laurent Prieur, co-founder of the project. Insertion restaurant, Nuggets! is also a place of meeting and conviviality for the inhabitants of Maurepas, a district which experienced an outbreak of violence in June against a backdrop of drug trafficking. “There was a lack of a place like that in the area to have a coffee and chat with neighbors,” says this resident, already used to the place.
Every Friday evening, Pépites! is transformed into a cooperative bistro with a cultural program built with the inhabitants and the actors of the district. “We want people to take ownership of this place and bring it to life,” assures Laurent Prieur, who also hopes that this project will change the image of Maurepas. “It’s a poor neighborhood but there is an incredible cultural richness here, underlines the manager of the place. There are also plenty of positive actions that are carried out there and we want to participate in this dynamic. »
A little landlocked, the Maurepas district should also take advantage of the commissioning of line B of the metro on Tuesday to open up to the city. “I hope it will bring a bit of social diversity to the neighborhood,” says one resident.