Mr. Passard's three-star establishment is of course no conventional veggie place with heaps of rice and lentils.
On a recent morning, the rituals of mourning played out over sweet tea and heaps of rice and lamb in the Baghdad home of Salah al-Obeidi, a prominent lawyer who days earlier was shot to death in his office just up the road.
Student volunteers scoop heaps of rice, lentils and green vegetables into bowls, which the children then take outside or to their classrooms.
He is hungry for a heap of rice pudding crowned by a snowcap of whipped cream, and he digs in after removing the maraschino cherry.
So do earth-tone Uzbek items like the funchoza ($3.99 a pound), a lightly vinegared heap of rice vermicelli with carrot and pickled cucumber; and "brake" salad ($8.99 a pound), a thatch of bracken fern stems, grayish-brown, chewy.
Eight dollars buys a generous dinner that includes a main course, a heap of rice or scallion-flecked mashed potatoes, a vegetable side dish (like a medley of broccoli, cauliflower and carrots) and gravy over whatever you would like.
One dessert, a simple one, stands out: a warm heap of rice flavored with coconut milk, with a mango half ($5) sliced and turned inside out (a technique called the hedgehog; you will see why).
A dinner plateful of a round flat corn griddle cake (called arepa) smothered with baby shrimp and onions costs $5 (and is delicious), an entire roast chicken, served with a huge heap of rice, beans and salad is $9.
For carnivores, there's also a lamb maffé, but first and foremost among the meat dishes are the Thiebu Djen, mildly spicy stewed fish served with a conical heap of rice and cassava, and the Thiebu Yapp (the same, with lamb).
For example, serve a kabob on a heaping of rice, or serve grilled swordfish on a pile of mashed potatoes.
One basket comes heaped with meat around a daunting mound of rice.
