Inside Sweet Rehab, where Chef David Zaquine turns Parisian technique and Moroccan-Israeli memory into the city’s most photographed dessert.
There is a version of the American dream that arrives with a suitcase, a diploma from one of Paris’s most decorated culinary schools, and absolutely nothing else. No English. No apartment. No family nearby. No safety net. That is how Chef David Zaquine remembers landing in New York, and it is the version of the story that makes Sweet Rehab, his champagne-and-dessert bar tucked onto Sullivan Street, feel less like a bakery and more like a manifesto.
“I came just to live the American dream,” Zaquine says. “People were thinking I was crazy. But it was my dream to come here and to have the opportunity to maybe one day open my own place.”
A Pastry Education, the Hard Way
Zaquine’s path to SoHo began at seventeen, in front of a television. A documentary profiling France’s most celebrated pastry chefs, one from Paris, one from Monaco, one from Saint-Tropez, showed a teenager what was possible with nothing more than eggs, flour, and a pair of trained hands. “It was amazing, because it explained how, with just eggs and flour, you can create art, all by hand,” he says. “I saw that, and I thought, I want to be part of that.”
His parents wanted him to study first and cook later. He talked them into something else: a spot at École Ferrandi in Paris, the storied culinary school often nicknamed “the Harvard of gastronomy.” He walked away with a pastry diploma, then a baking diploma, then a third certification, building, as he puts it, “a strong base” before ever stepping into a professional kitchen.
That base multiplied fast. Over eight years, Zaquine worked his way through some of Paris’s most decorated dining rooms, including the Plaza Athénée, Le Cinq at the Four Seasons Hotel George V, and Pur’ at the Park Hyatt Paris-Vendôme, chasing Michelin stars specifically because they demanded a different vocabulary of dessert. “It was the best level, and it taught me how to do dessert plates, not just boutique pastry,” he says. Even then, he was quietly sketching a hybrid he hadn’t yet built: part bakery-café, part dessert-plate restaurant, open late, pouring champagne.
Building From Nothing, Twice
New York gave him his first opportunity to test that hybrid, eventually. He landed a chef position at Bagatelle, the see-and-be-seen French restaurant known as much for its parties as its plates. “They told me it was a big challenge, because there was no pastry chef, and I could build everything from scratch,” Zaquine says. He took it. Over three and a half years, he grew the pastry program from a one-man operation into a team of nine or ten.
Then, in the fall of 2019, he did it again on his own terms. Zaquine signed the lease on Sweet Rehab roughly two months before COVID-19 shut the city down. “Thank God we survived,” he says simply. “I’m so grateful for that.” The shop, a demolition-and-rebuild of a former bakery at 135 Sullivan Street, opened its doors and never really scaled back its ambitions: champagne service, an open kitchen, and hours that run until midnight, a rarity for a pastry counter anywhere in the country.
Three Cultures on One Plate
Ask Zaquine what makes his desserts distinct from the French classics he trained on, and the answer isn’t technique. It’s geography. His parents were born and raised in Morocco; he was born and raised in Paris; as a child, he spent two and a half years living in Israel. “I’m a mix of three cultures,” he says. “So I try to bring Middle Eastern touches into my cakes, orange blossom, rosewater, almond, pistachio, and combine that with French technique.”
That fusion is deliberate, not decorative. Where a classically French pâtissier might reach for vanilla and citrus, Zaquine reaches for flavors that carry his family’s geography, then assembles them with the precision his Parisian training demands. The result is a menu that changes with the seasons: strawberries when strawberries are at the market, apricots and peaches when summer arrives. “We follow the season the way fashion follows it,” he says. “We’re already thinking about what’s next before it gets here.”
A Family Business, Literally
Sweet Rehab’s visual identity, the black-and-white packaging dotted with bee and strawberry motifs, the storefront itself, was designed not by an outside branding firm but by Zaquine and his mother. “She’s not a graphic designer, but she’s a real artist,” he says. She is a modiste: a milliner who makes hats, wedding gowns, and kimonos by hand. Together, the two of them built the shop’s visual language from scratch, the same way they built its flavors: his mother taught him to cook long before culinary school did, while his father owned three chocolate shops in Paris. “I grew up with chocolate, I grew up with food, always with my mom,” Zaquine says.
That partnership extended to the shop’s most distinctive architectural choice: an open kitchen, visible through glass to anyone walking in off Sullivan Street. “I created that for two reasons,” he explains. “So you, as a customer, can see that everything is fresh. And so my team feels free, they have light, they can see the customer enjoying what they made. A lot of kitchens are stuck in an ugly basement. I wanted people to be happy to come to work here.”
The approach is intentional right down to the layout: bench placement, floor material, lighting, where the eye lands first when a customer walks in. It’s a formula Zaquine and his mother have now run twice. Sweet Rehab’s second location, on the Upper East Side, opened roughly four months ago with a completely different palette, black and gold in place of SoHo’s red and green, proof that for Zaquine, no two rooms should tell the same visual story, even if they’re telling the same brand story.
Design Second, Flavor First
For all the attention paid to packaging and interiors, Zaquine insists the visual work is secondary to what happens on the palate. “Sometimes you go somewhere and the design is incredible, but the taste isn’t there,” he says. “For me, taste comes before design, always.” Every dessert goes through repeated rounds of testing before it earns a spot on the case, chasing what he calls harmony between mousse, crunch, sauce, and glaze.
It’s a philosophy that mirrors the location itself. SoHo wasn’t a fallback choice or a real-estate accident. It’s the neighborhood Zaquine had been dreaming about since he was a teenager in Paris, long before he had a business plan or a green card. “Even before I moved to New York, at seventeen, I was already dreaming of opening a bakery here,” he says. “If I opened in Paris, it would be Le Marais, fashion, food, luxury brands, all mixed together. It was never really a question. SoHo, always.”
What Comes Next
Two locations in, Zaquine is already sketching the next chapter. “My dream is to keep building a group with different concepts,” he says. An ice-cream concept is next on the list, followed, eventually, by ideas built around bread and sandwiches. The through-line, he insists, will always be the same: French technique, French product, executed at wildly different registers, street food, gourmet, luxury, without ever repeating the same room twice.
Ask what part of the job he loves most, and the answer isn’t the dessert case. “I love the design part, the bench, the floor, the lights, where the center of the room is,” he says. “Except the food, of course. I love to cook, to bake. But after that, renovation, packaging, the way the box feels in your hand, I enjoy all of it too much.”
It is, in its way, the same instinct that sent a seventeen-year-old to a documentary-fueled culinary school decades ago: the belief that pastry was never just food. It was always going to be art, built by hand, one flavor memory at a time.
Sweet Rehab is located at 135 Sullivan Street in SoHo, with a second location at 167 East 87th Street on the Upper East Side. Open daily until midnight.
