Arpège – from hay-roasted chicken to an all-vegetable three-star

Arpège stands at 84 rue de Varenne, on one of the quietest and most institutional streets of the 7th arrondissement, between the sculpture garden of the Musée Rodin and the walls of the Hôtel Matignon. Alain Passard bought the address in 1986 from his mentor Alain Senderens, who had run it as L'Archestrate, and renamed it Arpège. It earned one Michelin star in its first year, a second soon after, and a third in 1996, a distinction it has held since. It holds Three MICHELIN Stars. For most of its history the restaurant was one of Paris's great rotisseries, built on Passard's mastery of hay-roasted chicken; today it is the first three-star restaurant in France to serve an almost entirely plant-based menu, after Passard removed meat, fish, dairy and eggs from the carte on 21 July 2025, keeping only the honey from his own beehives.

01The room and the setting

Passard renamed his dining room the salle à déguster — the tasting room — a small shift in language that announces how the space is meant to be read. The address sits on one of the most institutional streets of the capital, lined with ministries, embassies and private mansions, and one of its quietest. Rue de Varenne runs between the sculpture garden of the Musée Rodin and the gates of the Hôtel Matignon, the French prime minister's official residence.

02The chef

Alain Passard was born in La Guerche-de-Bretagne in 1956, the son of musicians, and still plays the saxophone. He trained under the Michelin-starred Breton chef Michel Kéréver at Le Lion d'Or in Liffré between 1971 and 1975, then under the classicist Gaston Boyer at La Chaumière, before joining Alain Senderens's kitchen at L'Archestrate in 1977. He won two Michelin stars of his own at Le Duc d'Enghien at the age of 26, and two more at the Carlton in Brussels in 1984, before returning to Paris to buy L'Archestrate from Senderens and turn it into Arpège.

Insider tip

Open Monday–Friday only, lunch and dinner; closed weekends; no valet parking.

In 1997 he represented France in the Iron Chef World Cup in Kyoto, beating the American chef Patrick Clark on a lobster theme and tying Iron Chef Komei Nakamura on foie gras, before narrowly losing the final to Iron Chef Hiroyuki Sakai on a chicken theme.

03The cooking

Passard first unsettled the rarefied world of French haute cuisine in 2001, when he dropped red meat from the menu and said he intended to build his cooking around what grew in his own gardens. He kept the instincts of a rôtisseur and turned them on vegetables instead: smoking potatoes, flambéing onions and slow-roasting beetroot in a salt crust, pairing melon with aubergine or asparagus with rhubarb.

On 21 July 2025 he went further still, removing fish, dairy and eggs as well, keeping only honey from his own hives. "Today, I'm moving more towards a cuisine of emotion, a cuisine that I could describe as artistic. It's closer to painting and sewing," he said of the change. MICHELIN's international director, Gwendal Poullennec, called the move a "positive approach."

04The gardens

The vegetables arrive daily from two organic gardens Passard owns outside Paris, tended by a team of nine gardeners led by Sylvain Picard, who has worked with the restaurant for more than twenty years. Bois Giroult, an eighteenth-century estate between Dreux and Évreux in Normandy, has clay soil that favours onions, beetroot and turnips, with broad beans in spring and melons in summer. Gros Chesnay, hidden behind tall hedges south of Le Mans, has sandy ground suited to asparagus, strawberries and peas in spring, tomatoes in summer and carrots in winter.

05What to order

The carte now follows what the gardens send that week. Expect a mosaic of tomatoes, flamed aubergine with melon confit, and a medley of onion, carrot, shallot and cabbage. A mesclun praline with roasted almonds and melon carpaccio opens the dinner menu, while the seasonal repertoire runs to tomatoes scented with orange blossom and fig leaf, aubergine with melon and lemongrass, and a red rhubarb tart to finish.

06The neighbourhood

Arpège is a ten-minute walk from the Musée d'Orsay and close to the Rodin Museum, making gallery and table an easy pairing for an afternoon. Across the street, the gravel paths and bronzes of the Musée Rodin's garden are the obvious place to walk off lunch, before the business of government resumes behind the gates of the Hôtel Matignon next door.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.