38 | JULY 29 • 2021 

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 Russian-
style crepes for his family. 
“Whenever someone wanted 
crepes, I was supposed to make 
them,
” he says. “Cooking was in 
my DNA.
”

Fleysher’s great-grandmother 
was a chef. His great-grand-
father also operated a kosher 
butcher shop. “Before the 
Soviets came to Latvia, my fam-
ily was making kosher food and 
kosher meat for Jewish people,
” 
he explains. “I was inspired by 
them.
”
He likens his lifelong pas-
sion 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.
”

A NEW FUTURE
As Bistro Le Bliss, which will 
celebrate three years in oper-
ation 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 

Le Bliss’ traditional style of 
incorporating unusual ingredi-
ents into beautifully arranged 
plates. The restaurant plans to 
begin selling charbroiled stur-
geon, 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, devel-
oping and fine-tuning recipes.
“It’s trial and error,
” he con-
tinues. “Every day, you think 
about your inspirations and 
create new combinations from 
them. After several tries, you 
come up with the perfect com-
bination.
”
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 

NOSH

Bistro Le Bliss serves 
Eastern European fare 
with a French twist.

From
Russia

ASHLEY ZLATOPOLSKY
CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Chef puts the finishing touches 
on his food before it is sent out. 

JERRY ZOLYNSKY

JERRY ZOLYNSKY

