Arpège
Haute French restaurant · Invalides ·
Seasonal fine dining with vegetables from own kitchen gardens
Seasonal fine dining with vegetables from own kitchen gardens
"Ranked No. 45 on the 2025 World’s 50 Best Restaurants list." - Erin DeJesus
"The best cookbook ever written was by Mother Nature herself," according to Alain Passard. His name is associated with vegetables – and, for those in the know, a certain beetroot in a salt crust. He called it before anyone else with his 100% vegetable-based menu, initially considered radical. Nowadays, his green philosophy is de rigueur at every restaurant. Despite his success, the chef who fetes fruit and flowers never feels more at home than when in one of his three kitchen gardens in the west of France, where his twin vocations of cook and gardener meet. He heads there for inspiration, exploring the culinary possibilities of vegetables in a bid to elevate this ordinary ingredient so often relegated to the status of a side dish. A bucolic fresco references this environment in the restaurant's dining room." - Michelin Inspector
"Citrin first tasted hay-smoked chicken at Alain Passard’s Parisian restaurant L’Arpège in the late 1980s, and that experience inspired him to incorporate a hay-smoked poultry dish into Mélisse’s menu." - Matthew Kang
"A chef-driven temple of vegetables where transformative vegetable cookery is the central achievement — inventive, highly regarded, and widely cited for elevating vegetables to the level of haute cuisine." - Monica Burton
"Led by chef Alain Passard and holding three Michelin stars since 1986, this benchmark of produce-focused dining builds seasonal menus around vegetables and other items cultivated in the chef’s own gardens across France, delivering a vegetable-forward tasting experience that many vegetarians and vegans (and omnivores) praise as exceptional." - Vicki Denig