Café de la Paix Review: The Best Meal I Have Eaten in Paris

Café de la Paix is the best restaurant I have reviewed for The Chic Explorer, and the only one that has made me feel like minor royalty on a Monday night. The food is superb, the room is a listed monument, and the service is the reason I will go back.

Quick answer: yes, Café de la Paix, the 1862 restaurant inside the InterContinental Paris Le Grand opposite the Palais Garnier, is worth booking for dinner: two courses, two sides and four glasses of wine came to 267 euros for two with service included, and the French onion soup it created in 1862 is the best version I have eaten anywhere.

• Where: 2 Rue Scribe, 75009 Paris, on the corner of Boulevard des Capucines and Place de l'Opéra, directly opposite the Palais Garnier opera house, inside the InterContinental Paris Le Grand
• Visited: Monday 26 October 2026, table from 7.37pm, bill at 9.48pm
• Price paid: 267 euros for two, service included
• Cheaper option: a weekday lunch menu at 39 or 49 euros a head, Monday to Friday only
• Best for: a proper Paris occasion dinner, French classics cooked properly, and anyone who wants the landmark and the plate to both deliver
• Book ahead: yes. It was busy on a Monday night in October
• Michelin: no stars. It sits in the wider Michelin selection, and the kitchen is led by executive chef Laurent André
• Self funded: I paid the bill in full. A tour of the hotel and breakfast the following morning were offered to us afterwards, unprompted, and nobody there knew I write reviews
• Prices correct at time of visit

I booked one of the most famous restaurants in Paris on the recommendation of a chatbot, then told myself it had two Michelin stars. It has none. I had been snowed under with work the week before I flew, so the night before the trip I asked ChatGPT where to eat. My friend Denise did exactly the same thing on her own phone, and we both came back with Café de la Paix. We took that as fate rather than as two machines reading the same tourist pages.

I was in Paris to collect an award, which sounds glamorous and mostly involved a suitcase I had not unpacked since Barbados. We were staying at the Hilton Opera, nine minutes away on foot, and we took a taxi for those nine minutes: partly the protests going on in Paris that week, partly the fact that we both wanted to wear heels. What I did not know, right up until the end of the evening, was that the restaurant sits inside a hotel at all.

A woman met us at the door, took our coats and asked where we would like to sit, which is a small thing that tells you a lot. The dining room is Napoleon III, designed by the architect Alfred Armand when the restaurant opened on 30 June 1862 alongside the Grand Hôtel, and listed as a historic monument since 1975. Painted ceilings, gilded mouldings, gold columns, a little pleated lamp on every table. Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, Oscar Wilde and Marlene Dietrich have all sat in it. I am not going to tell you it beats the Ritz or Claridge's, but it is on par with both, and for atmosphere on an ordinary Monday it borders on taking them.

Our manager came over immediately, welcomed us, asked whether we had been before, and when we said no, offered to show us around the hotel later. We assumed he was our waiter. He had been there twenty six years. More on him shortly.

There is a 140 euro signature menu and I secretly wanted it: seasonal crisp, the 1862 onion soup, confit duck foie gras, scallops or the beef tournedos, lemon sorbet, the signature desserts and coffee with delicacies. You can add a wine pairing for 45 euros, either a glass of champagne, a signature cocktail called the Eugénie, or two glasses chosen by the sommelier. Denise, more sensible than me, pointed out we would then be unable to move. We went starter, main and sides instead. Here is what arrived and what it cost.

A brioche bun the size of a muffin, still warm, with salted butter moulded into a ridged cone. French butter is not the same product we buy at home and this one proved it. A second bread roll arrived later alongside the main. Two breads, one dinner. It would hardly be France otherwise.

The gratinée à l'oignon is the dish this restaurant invented, and the menu still lists it as the recipe from 1862. The cheese crust was a centimetre thick, properly bubbled and browned, with croutons and Comté underneath and a dark, sweet, beefy soup below that. I had the French onion soup at Derriere in Barbados a fortnight earlier and thought it was excellent, which it was. This one is in a different category. When a recipe is a hundred and sixty four years old and the people making it have never been allowed to change it, you can taste the practice.

At the end of the meal they hand you that recipe, written out in copperplate on heavy paper, rolled into a scroll and tied with a green Café de la Paix ribbon and tassel. Six sweet Cévennes onions, lemon juice, a little sugar, white wine, beef and chicken stock, gruyère on top. It is on my desk. I will never make it.

I had assumed this would repeat a fillet I ate in Barbados. It did not. A thick round of fillet, seared properly, under a slab of pan fried duck foie gras and a layer of thyme onion marmalade, sitting in a dark glossy sauce with fried potato gnocchi around the edge. The gnocchi are the detail people will not expect: crisp outside, soft in the middle, closer to a very superior chip than anything Italian. Denise had hers at 55 euros without the foie gras. Mine was 64 euros with it, and it is the nine euro difference I would spend again without thinking.

I cannot remember the last time a fillet steak made me stop talking. It happened here. The closest I have come recently was in Honfleur, which rather proves the point: France is forty minutes up and forty minutes down, and the food is on another level entirely.

We added buttered spinach and chips at 8 euros each, from a side list where everything is 8 euros. The béarnaise comes with the tournedos as standard and I did not touch it. The sauce already on the plate was doing the job.

We declined dessert, which the kitchen appeared to treat as a formality. Out came a tray of three: a fig tart, a vanilla millefeuille with a caramelised crisp top, and a layered chocolate square stamped in gold with the Café de la Paix crest. We halved all three. Then two sugared pâtes de fruit. Then, as we left, a small green gift box holding a chocolate bar embossed with the same crest.

If you want a proper dessert, the Norwegian Omelette 1867 is 20 euros and was created in this building, and the Grand Chocolate Mousse to share is 38 euros, from a Toulouse-Lautrec recipe. Next time.

We asked Denis, our waiter, to pair a glass with the soup and a glass with the main rather than reading the list ourselves. For the onion soup he brought a 2025 Pouilly Fumé Tradition from Serge Dagueneau et Filles, 17 euros a glass. Flinty and sharp, exactly right against all that sweet onion and cheese. For the beef he arrived with a bottle, a story about it having been opened by mistake the day before, and a price that was not the bottle price. Two glasses of red came to 48 euros on the bill. He looked after us, he topped us up more than twice, and I am not about to itemise a kindness.

Yes, and it is the single most useful thing in this review. Monday to Friday at lunch only, excluding weekends and public holidays, Café de la Paix runs two set menus: 39 euros for a starter and main, or a main and dessert, served in 45 minutes, and 49 euros for all three courses. That is lunch in a listed nineteenth century dining room opposite the opera house for less than the price of our two soups.

If you want the room and the kitchen without the dinner bill, go at lunch midweek. If you want the evening, the service and the theatre of it, come at night and accept what it costs.

Denis is the reason this review scores what it scores. He has been at Café de la Paix twelve years and he works the room like a man born on a stage: jokes, timing, a running commentary about the royal family, and not one moment of the forced charm you get from someone who has been trained to be charming. He was doing the same for every other table at once, which is the part people miss.

When we thanked him on the way out he refused to take it. He said it was not about him, it was the whole team, and then introduced us: Mary, Matteo, and the rest of a shift I failed to write down fast enough. The woman who ran front of house all night is the one name I never caught, and I feel bad about it.

Then the manager came back for the tour he had promised three hours earlier. He showed us the breakfast room, which is a sight on its own. I said out loud that I would love to eat breakfast there, and he said we could be his guest the next morning, fetched a voucher, and would not hear otherwise. Then he asked whether we wanted to see the event space.

There is a chandelier in that room roughly six feet across. He opened a cupboard, pressed a button, and lowered it to the floor so we could look at it properly. Two women he had never met before that evening, who had eaten dinner and paid a bill like everybody else. Twenty six years in the building, and he mentioned it only because we asked, which is the most French thing about the whole night: no performance of it, just the fact.

267 euros for two, service included, in a listed nineteenth century dining room opposite the Palais Garnier, with two glasses of white, two of red, two sides, bread twice, three complimentary desserts, pâtes de fruit and a gift on the way out. The soup is 25 euros and the fillet 55 before foie gras. That is London money for considerably more than a London room.

You can spend far more here, or far less. Burgundy snails are 21 euros for six, beef tartare carved at your table is 42, wagyu sirloin is 87, and thirty grams of Baeri caviar is 150. Nobody is forcing you up that ladder, and the two cheapest things we ate were the two best.

What I keep coming back to is that none of the generosity was transactional. Nobody there knew I write about restaurants. They were not buying coverage, because they had no idea coverage was on the table. That is the difference between a restaurant that performs hospitality and one that simply has it.

• Go on a weekday evening. A Monday in late October was busy without being frantic, and the staff had time to talk
• Book. Do not chance it at the door
• For the room on a budget, take the 39 or 49 euro set lunch, Monday to Friday
• Ask your waiter to pair wine by the glass rather than ordering a bottle. Best decision we made all evening
• Order the 1862 onion soup even if you think you are too sophisticated for onion soup. You are not
• Pay the nine euro difference for foie gras on the tournedos
• Leave room for a real dessert. We did not, and the Norwegian Omelette 1867 is still bothering me
• Tell them it is your first visit. Ours changed the entire evening

Worth it, without hesitation, and it goes straight to the top of my outstanding list. It is the best restaurant I have reviewed to date. If you are in Paris for one dinner and you want the full version of what that is supposed to mean, this is where I would send you. It suits an occasion, a first trip, or anyone who wants classic French cooking from people who have been doing it in the same room since 1862. If you want modern plating and tweezers, look elsewhere. This is a grand brasserie, proudly, and very good at being one.

Book a table: cafedelapaix.fr

Dinner for two at Café de la Paix cost us 267 euros in October 2026, service included. That covered two French onion soups at 25 euros each, two beef tournedos at 55 and 64 euros, buttered spinach and chips at 8 euros each, and four glasses of wine. A weekday set lunch is far cheaper at 39 or 49 euros.

No. Café de la Paix holds no Michelin stars, although it appears in the wider Michelin selection and the kitchen is led by executive chef Laurent André. It is a grand historic brasserie rather than a fine dining restaurant, and on the evidence of my dinner the cooking is better than that absence suggests.

The French onion soup at Café de la Paix was created there in 1862 and the menu still lists it as the recipe from that year. It comes with croutons and Comté under a thick cheese crust, costs 25 euros, and the restaurant hands you the handwritten recipe as a ribboned scroll at the end of your meal.

Café de la Paix runs set menus at lunch from Monday to Friday, excluding weekends and public holidays: 39 euros for two courses served inside 45 minutes, or 49 euros for three. In the evening there is a 140 euro signature menu, with an optional wine pairing at 45 euros a head.

Café de la Paix is at 2 Rue Scribe in the 9th arrondissement, on the corner of Place de l'Opéra opposite the Palais Garnier, inside the InterContinental Paris Le Grand. Book ahead. The dining room was close to full on a Monday evening in late October, so arriving at a weekend without a reservation would be optimistic.

If you want more of these, where I pay the bill and tell you what it actually cost, join The Chic List. No spam, just the places worth your money and the ones that are not.