Le Grand Café: inside the hottest new brasserie in Paris

To be made custodian of one of the great Parisian historical spaces is a heavy responsibility. It was laid upon the interior designer Joseph Dirand when he was asked to design a café inside the newly restored Grand Palais.

The day before Le Grand Café opens, Dirand stalks the room, full of diners for the first time at the “rehearsal lunch”. Is he satisfied? He shrugs: “The opening is the moment when you accept the imperfections. It feels almost foreign to me, as if someone else had designed it. It no longer belongs to us, it belongs to the people.”

From now on, Le Grand Café is part of Paris. It’s not just a quintessentially Parisian space, converted, like so many in recent years, into a luxury hangout. It’s also the creation of a team of quintessentially Parisian craftspeople. To hear them recount its making is to appreciate what still makes the city special. 

Everything starts with a great building. The Grand Palais represents the peak of Paris’s navel-of-the-world confidence during the belle époque – so much so that the vast beaux-arts glass-and-steel republican palace, built for the Universal Exhibition of 1900, was meant as a mere temporary construction. The city’s Métro had then just opened, and the Universal Exhibition also showcased an electric railway, news film, and many of the world’s great recent paintings and photographs (not all of them French).

It no longer belongs to us, it belongs to the people

Over the next century, Parisians visited the Grand Palais for exhibitions and other great events, but rarely to eat or hang out. The palace wasn’t welcoming. Now, following the building’s most extensive renovations ever, the Loulou restaurant group plans to change that. It is run by a brother-and-sister team, Gilles and Claire Malafosse, who come from a line of Parisian restaurateurs: their family has owned Le Flandrin in the 16th arrondissement since 1936. That grand restaurant used to be “the bar-tabac of the railway station”, says Claire, who left her career as a criminal lawyer to team up with her brother.

They specialise in restaurants in beautiful spaces, including in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the Riviera and at Courchevel. Gilles also raised the game of museum restaurants, which Dirand says have traditionally been “disgusting cafeterias”. He notes that in a city of intimate neighbourhood eating places, “we have never been very fond of these big, somewhat fashionable restaurants”. Dirand designed Monsieur Bleu (now under other ownership) in Paris’s Palais de Tokyo (“the architecture was a bit Mussolini-esque”) and later the restaurant in the Louvre’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs, where the space resembled “a boudoir, almost like a brothel”.

Any designer working in an historic space needs to respect the architecture. The Grand Palais is a high-ceilinged palace. You can’t tone down its grandeur, says Dirand. “We have to merit what has been given us.” The problem was, “How to transform the monumental into intimacy?” His answer was to place “a forest of lights” – whose designs evoke the belle époque – at table level. While the ceiling assures monumentality, the low lighting creates intimacy. The room’s acoustics were fixed so it wouldn’t be one of those grand restaurants where nobody can hear anyone.

You enter the restaurant through the bar, where snacks are served all day, past the bandstand where soft jazz will play in the evenings, into the dining room. At the far end is an oyster bar, the kitchen, and, facing it, two chefs’ tables. Outside, the terrace with its original tiled floors has one of Paris’s best views, looking across the Champs-Elysées at the Petit Palais.

We don’t hire professionals of the trade, we take nice people

Dirand admits that once, on first seeing another of his restaurants, he felt disappointed: it looked pompous. Not today, in the cheery Le Grand Café. He reflects: “It’s between a train station, receiving visitors from around the world, and a cathedral and a theatre.” A grand space can intimidate customers, Gilles adds. It takes kind waiters to make them feel welcome. “We don’t hire professionals of the trade, we take nice people,” he says. Training them into competence is easier than giving someone a personality transplant.

Why do some Parisian restaurants treat customers with contempt? He replies, “It’s the idea that we are the capital of gastronomy.” 

The food is, to use a technical term, heavenly. It’s the traditional French kitchen updated, with simply prepared fresh ingredients, and light sauces. The menu’s markers of modernity include raw fishes, and a fabulous tomato tart – a wink to the Mediterranean cuisine that was undervalued 30 years ago when French supermarkets didn’t even sell balsamic vinegar. Benoît Dargère, the Loulou Group’s executive chef, emerges from the kitchen to explain: “French cuisine, its ingredients and techniques, always evolves, within the tradition of the cuisine bourgeoise. That’s the ambition appropriate to this place.” There’s also salmon and sorrel, an île flottante dessert and a potato salad that Dargère describes as “mother’s cuisine”, the kind of thing French people like him grew up on. 

For the bar, Loulou consulted with the man once named “the world’s greatest bartender” by Forbes magazine, Colin Field, an Englishman in Paris. At 16, he installed a bar in his bedroom to serve his friends. “My mum wasn’t very happy about that.” From 1994 until 2023 he was head barman of the Bar Hemingway in the Paris Ritz. Field’s model for running a bar is entertaining someone at home. He disapproves of American bartenders who ask when you’re halfway through your drink whether you want another. After all, he notes, “You wouldn’t say that in your own home.” Instead, Field likes to wait until the customer has almost finished the glass, and then ask, “Is everything all right? Is there anything I can do for you? By the way, we have this splendid gin, from the Mediterranean…”

Le Grand Café offers several cocktails invented by Field. On his recommendation, I have his Serendipity: a Calvados Coquerel, with clear apple juice, fresh mint and Moët Impérial Champagne. As he says, the ingredients blend into an extremely superior cider.

After three hours, I lean back with the sense of wellbeing that comes from top-notch Parisian food, drink and conversation imbibed in a top-notch Parisian place. It might be theoretically possible to put together a space this good in another city, but it probably wouldn’t happen.

What do the Malafosses make of the rehearsal lunch? Unhappily for them, each is cursed with the Parisian eye, trained since toddlerdom to pick out the tiniest blemish in a space. Gilles winces: “I see the faults. I don’t yet see the ballet of waiters.” He means the waiters’ arrivals to and exits from table, which should ensure the constant satisfaction of each guest, while being so invisible as to never interrupt a conversation. I hadn’t noticed anything wrong. It all seemed pretty balletic to me.