A new bistro near Pigalle serving dishes like roasted cod with fennel bulb carbonara or calf’s liver with onions and roasted garlic. Lunch for 18€ and dinner menus for 25€ and 32€.
Ingredient fetishists will appreciate Sven Chartier’s reverence for product, and devotees of natural wines will love Ewan Lemoigne’s list. The ingredients may be local, but there are nordic influences at play, too, both in the look of the place and in the pristine cooking, which borders — and sometimes crosses into — austerity. Warning: complaints about the service have been circulating…
Hélène Darroze is one of the only women to have a Michelin star, which is an interesting sociological fact, if not necessarily a reason to eat at her eponymous restaurant. Darroze hails from southwestern France, and her cooking is strongly accented with flavors from that region, here elevated to one-star levels in a modern, luxe dining room, as well as the less formal “salon,” where small plates are available. Menus from 52€ (lunch) to 125€.
Celebrity chef Cyril Lignac took over this historic bistro in 2008, and while he’s something of a pretty boy, the real looker is the room itself, with its painted ceiling and curvy woodwork. On the menu? A more-or-less classic mix of bistro favorites — steak with bearnaise, pommes dauphines — which, if well-executed, don’t bear much of a personal signature. (Except, perhaps, in the prices.)
That executive chef Phillipe Labbés name is nearly homophonous to the name of this luxe enclave in the new Shangri-La hotel is only coincidence. “The bee” (as it translates) is actually a nod to the building’s Bonapartian heritage; it was built in 1896 by a princely nephew of the former emperor, whose coat of arms included a few golden bees. A century later, critics are buzzing about this addition to Paris’ haute dining scene. Many dishes present a main ingredient in dueling acts; meat and fowl come from royal lineage; the room is fit for modern aristocrats. It probably goes without saying that the prices will sting.
With a minimum lunch bill of 35€, and dinner menus at 50€ and 77€, is this really a bistro? Maybe not, but this offshoot of gastronomic sibling Agapé, showcasing chef Katsuaki Okiyama’s precise, balanced and modern cooking, has been widely praised, in spite of prices that are, as Gilles Pudlowski puts it, “pas forcement tendres.”
At this small, contemporary bistro near the Centre Pompidou, Chef Mickael Gaigner shows off his skills — honed in high end kitchens — at reasonable prices.
Franck Baranger’s modern bistro near Pigalle is turning out dishes like celery root soup, oyster tartare, and a standout côte de cochon. Two courses at lunch for 17€, three at dinner for 32€.
If the walls at Lasserre could talk, they would tell stories about white doves, Marc Chagall, ortolan, and Audrey Hepburn, stories of glitterati and résistants taking their truffled macaroni under the retractable roof.
A Phillipe Starck-designed dining room facing Laurent André’s open kitchen, a Bresse chicken priced in the three digit zone, a choice of 16 Pierre Hermé mille-feuilles: The age of austerity has not yet dawned at the Royal Monceau on avenue Hoche, and probably never will.
Like a couple who has decided to have kids, the former owners of L’Epigramme have moved to a larger space in the 15th, where they are continuing to serve the generous bistro cooking that brought them notice back in the 6th.
A refined Franco-Japanese address from the owners of Youlin, opened just in time to make at least one best-of-2010 list. Dinner menus at 55 and 75€.
Joël Robuchon’s empire expands again with the opening of another Atelier, this time on the Champs-Elysées. Expect deft use of global ingredients, pristine products, pretty people, and a wait, unless you nab reservation for lunch or the first dinner seating; otherwise, it’s first come, first served.
This seafood restaurant Rech, around since 1925, is now part of the Alain Ducasse bistro collection.
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