He’s early. I’m not sure how early he got to Au Passage, a restaurant serving small plates (Aziz’s choice) that’s tucked away on a graffiti-riddled street in central Paris. But he beat me—and I was early. I found him leaning on a wall, alone. Not looking at his phone or speaking with the maître d’. In fact, his posture didn’t project any of the standard anxiety one gets while waiting alone in a crowded place. After a short back-and-forth about whether the Gucci Prince town slippers I’m wearing are still cool (when it comes to matters of taste, Aziz has opinions on everything), we sit down, elbow to elbow with other Americans who are excited to overpay for a sliver of duck.
Watching the second season of Aziz’s Netflix hit, Master of None, was like watching Kobe in a legacy-sealing playoff game. He just kept hitting shot after shot, each one more creative and impressive than the one before it. Season two has the black lesbian coming-out story. It has eight minutes of silence. (It involves a deaf couple; you just have to watch it.) It has a 12-year-old Indian boy singing pitch-perfect D’Angelo. (It’s Aziz’s character, Dev, in a flashback.) Watching the show is to watch a popular American stand-up comic who sold out Madison Square Garden but wasn’t exactly threatening Richard Pryor’s throne evolve into a legit streaming-television auteur—the execution is that original, artful, and assured.If there’s any explanation for Aziz’s total comfort at a small artisanal restaurant in a foreign city, it could be because this has become his comfort zone. Much has been made of the time Aziz spent in Italy before shooting part of season two in Modena, but Italy is the least of it. He lived here in Paris for a month. Went to Japan for a summer. Speaks a smattering of the languages. Who knows where he’s plotting to move next?
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