Apicius – a country mansion behind the Champs-Élysées

Behind the Champs-Élysées, in Paris's Triangle d'Or, Apicius occupies a mansion built in 1860 for the Marquis Auguste de Talhouët-Roy on what had been the stables of the Comte d'Artois, brother of Louis XVI. The house passed to the Schneider family, then to filmmaker Luc Besson, who installed his production company's offices there, before it became a restaurant in 2000 under chef Jean-Pierre Vigato. Since 2018 it has been reinvented by chef Mathieu Pacaud, son of Bernard Pacaud of the three-Michelin-starred L'Ambroisie, in partnership with restaurateur Laurent de Gourcuff, who together bought the house that year. It holds One MICHELIN Star. The rooms were dressed by decorator François-Joseph Graf, who also signed the interiors of L'Ambroisie, and the whole address turns around a garden that becomes, for an hour or two, a beautiful green refuge pierced by table settings laid outdoors whenever the weather allows.

01The room and the setting

Graf took his cue from the building's Louis XV architecture, then quietly broke its conventions rather than reproducing them, giving the grand enfilade of salons a younger, lighter air without erasing the sense of history in the mouldings and volumes. Guests cross the courtyard and choose between rooms such as the one locals call the Klimt room or a smaller, cosier lounge, before the meal even begins.

Outside, the courtyard that once served as parking for luxury cars has become the discreet, sought-after terrace of the 8th arrondissement, screened by greenery from the traffic of the rue d'Artois just metres from the Champs-Élysées.

02The chef

Mathieu Pacaud grew up inside L'Ambroisie, the three-starred Place des Vosges address run by his father Bernard; he worked every station there before taking over as head chef. In 2015 he opened his first restaurants under his own name, Hexagone and Histoires, in the same Avenue Kléber space, which earned one and two MICHELIN Stars respectively within a year. He went on to revive Le Divellec and to open a summer table at the Domaine de Murtoli in Corsica, a trajectory that took him, by the end of 2017, to Apicius itself, which he called the opportunity of a lifetime and the most beautiful restaurant in Paris.

Insider tip

Tasting menus €180–€220 in Oct 2026; garden tables weather permitting; valet parking offered.

In the kitchen today he is seconded by executive chef Matthieu Lecomte, the pairing that has carried the house back to its MICHELIN Star under the Pacaud–de Gourcuff ownership.

03The cooking

The repertoire perpetuates the fine bourgeois tradition of French haute cuisine while pushing it toward a synthesis of classicism and creativity rather than nostalgia for its own sake. Seasons set the pace: an autumn carte built around ceps, chestnuts, game birds and truffle gives way, through the year, to shellfish, citrus and garden vegetables, always worked with a produce-first directness that favours both raw and cooked textures on the same plate.

04What to order

From the autumn carte read on the restaurant's own site: a dome of ceps in meurette sauce with smoked bacon and truffled consommé; blue lobster grilled over a wood fire with candied ceps and celeriac; veal sweetbread gilded with fresh horseradish, chanterelles and chestnuts; and scallops studded with Paris mushrooms in a hazelnut-butter emulsion with golden caviar. To finish, the chocolate soufflé with cocoa sorbet and the Saint-Honoré Apicius, built to share at the table, both sit alongside a Paris-Brest of hazelnut and caramelised almond praline.

05Wine and drinks

The cellar has long been one of the address's quiet strengths, praised for a wine list as generous as the attentions paid to guests from the first course to the last. In the garden, a separate outdoor bar keeps its own, simpler rhythm through the warmer months, pouring wine by the glass alongside grilled lobster for those who want the greenery without the full tasting menu.

06When to go and booking

The garden comes into its own from spring to early autumn, when tables move outdoors and the mansion's courtyard, once used for parking luxury cars, turns back into the quiet, leafy retreat that gives Apicius its particular magic.

07The neighbourhood

Rue d'Artois sits in the Triangle d'Or, the gilded pocket of the 8th arrondissement wedged between the Champs-Élysées and Avenue Montaigne, a short walk from the métro station Franklin Roosevelt. It is a setting of embassies, couture houses and private mansions turned offices, where Apicius remains one of the few addresses still built, literally, as a 19th-century house rather than a shopfront.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.