Here’s a place I really enjoyed, located a little over a ten-minute walk from the Relais du Louvre, on the beautiful Rue de Richelieu, right next to the Palais Royal. I wanted to try the three-course lunch menu. I have fond memories of the place, the truly warm welcome, a very pleasant conversation with chef Jason Gouzy, and, of course, the main thing: a wonderful dining experience at an affordable price.
The chef at this restaurant champions a style of cuisine he calls “popular bourgeois”: high-quality ingredients and technical mastery, with gourmet, familiar—even nostalgic—elements. His goal is to evoke a “Proustian madeleine” in his guests—something that brings back a fond memory from the past, often linked to childhood.
I didn’t quite experience that “Proustian madeleine” moment, but I did sense a complexity, variety, and refinement in the flavors and textures of a generous cuisine with a French foundation but also Japanese influences.
The restaurant offers a lunch menu for €65 and a five-course menu for €135. For dinner, it also offers a six-course menu for €189.
The wine list is incredibly extensive, featuring 800 French wines from every region. The sommelier, who had just arrived, had a hard time estimating the number of bottles aging in the cellar. I’ll let you imagine…
The restaurant has two dining rooms with an open kitchen between them. We’ll take a quick look inside at the end of the meal.
The appetizers set the tone right from the start: focaccia crackers, Parmesan crackers, and zucchini churros served with their blossoms, beautifully arranged on a Jacques Pergay porcelain tile. This introduction establishes a signature style in which the interplay of textures and flavors is expressed with creativity and a flair for presentation.
The breads are homemade. The restaurant offers wheat bread, buckwheat bread—which is truly exquisite—and a seaweed brioche served with miso butter. These accompany the Pantagruelian egg, which, I’m told, took the chef five years of research to perfect.
Rest assured, the nod to Pantagruel is in the container: a ceramic egg about thirty centimeters tall. You “crack the shell” to reveal a plate full of food.
The composition is complex: a ring of rice encasing a perfectly cooked egg yolk, a variety of Japanese-style vinegared rice—served as a mousse and as a cracker—all topped with trout roe.
The dish is very well-structured, both in texture and flavor, with a particularly refined Japanese flair. Paired with the buttered brioche, it’s absolutely delicious.
The next dish is veal served as a triptych.
On the main plate, the veal is served with a seaweed garnish—a small seaweed maki. The sauce is a veal stock with chili peppers. On the second plate, I have a veal head terrine with a butter foam and a fresh herb salad. Finally, I have a Pithiviers filled with veal, tomato, and seaweed. I love the sweet-and-salty flavor of the veal stock. The maki is magnificent, with a nicely tangy note. We’re taken on a delightful journey between land and sea, France and Japan! The veal is cooked to perfection and very tender.
It’s already time for dessert, featuring another beautiful triptych with a particularly striking presentation.
It’s a candied and poached peach, served with peach sorbet. It’s accompanied by a moist, delicately buttery “gâteau de voyage,” topped with thin slices of peach.
The dessert strikes a perfect balance with the peach’s sweet flavor, enhanced by the sorbet’s tartness. It’s impossible to resist dipping the cake into the sauce on the large plate. The juice, served in a glass, is meant to be drunk and is a truly sweet syrup.
Our chef loves to create dramatic presentations. The petit four is a fruit paste served on an absinthe spoon. The juice is a sweet infusion made from hibiscus, elderflower, and nettle.
It’s time to say goodbye to this wonderful team, which includes ten people in the kitchen and seven in the dining room. Jason Gouzy and his team are talented. Based on this lunch, a second star doesn’t seem out of reach to me. And the chef, who’s so personable, seems to have a few more great chapters to write.
Pantagruel
10 Rue de Richelieu, 75001 Paris
Monday through Friday from 12:15 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. and from 7:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
https://www.restaurant-pantagruel.com