Frenchie Pigalle – Greg Marchand's mischief in SoPi

Frenchie Pigalle occupies the ground floor of Grand Pigalle Experimental, the four-star hotel on the corner of rue Victor-Massé and rue Henry-Monnier in Paris's 9th arrondissement. Chef Greg Marchand opened the restaurant here in 2020 as a management contract with the Experimental Group, developing a bespoke menu and working closely with the hotel's designers, eleven years after his flagship bistro on rue du Nil made his name and later earned him a MICHELIN star. Marchand himself has described the move as his first Parisian act of infidelity to rue du Nil, calling Frenchie Pigalle a free spirit with a globalised cuisine born of his years cooking abroad, deliberately more sexy-trash than its older sibling. The restaurant is Selected in the MICHELIN Guide. Around an open kitchen, oak tables and a green marble counter set the tone for a room built on the same playful, bohemian energy that runs through the streets of SoPi outside its windows.

01The room and the setting

Grand Pigalle opened as a hotel in 2015, its retro interiors by designer Dorothée Meilichzon reportedly drawing on Wes Anderson's film The Grand Budapest Hotel across the property's 37 rooms. For the restaurant itself, Meilichzon's studio worked directly with Marchand: oak tables and a large green marble counter were drawn to double as the open kitchen, the spot where diners can watch the open fire and the chefs in action. The chairs are vintage pieces by the French cabinetmaker André Sornay, and the walls are finished in lime plaster.

A ceramicist's touch completes the room: working with Marion Graux, the design team created a large fresco made of hand-drawn, hand-glazed ceramic pieces, produced in her Paris workshop. The result sits somewhere between a neighbourhood bistro and a design showcase, with the dining room opening directly onto rue Victor-Massé.

02The chef

Greg Marchand's path to Pigalle began far from Paris. Orphaned young, he learned to cook in the kitchens of the orphanage in Nantes where he grew up, taking over weekend service from the regular cook and working through classic dishes like veal with mushrooms and cream. He later worked in London, at Jamie Oliver's restaurant Fifteen, where Oliver nicknamed him "Frenchie" for being the only Frenchman in the kitchen — a name that stuck to his entire career. From there he passed through the Mandarin Oriental in Knightsbridge and then its Hong Kong sister property, cooking at Jean-Georges Vongerichten's French-Asian restaurant Vong, before further stints in Spain and New York.

Insider tip

Open daily; breakfast, lunch, Sunday brunch and dinner served inside the Grand Pigalle Experimental hotel.

Marchand opened his first restaurant, Frenchie, on returning to Paris in 2009, and has since built a small empire of addresses across Paris and London under the same name. His link to the Experimental Group dates back to the same era: the group's Experimental Cocktail Club opened in 2007 and Frenchie in 2009, and the friendship that followed eventually brought Marchand into the kitchen at Grand Pigalle.

03The cooking and what to order

The menu leans into the spontaneous, slightly knowing register Marchand describes in his own words: dishes built for sharing, inspired by seasonal produce and by the cuisines he encountered on his travels. The signature opener is the Frenchie Bacon Scone, followed by what the kitchen itself calls its naughtier creations — Sweetbread Nuggets with Caviar and Raw Cream, and Smoked Ricotta with Roasted Apricot and Rosemary Sabayon.

Elsewhere on the board, gougères made with Manech tête noire sheep's cheese and piment d'Espelette turn up as a seasonal special, while Sunday brings a dedicated brunch service built around a New York classic reinterpreted with Parisian touches — avocado toast, eggs Benedict and pancakes finished with salted caramel butter, timed for a pause before the climb up to Montmartre.

04Wine and drinks

Marchand's own description of the drinks list reads almost like a dish in itself: red, white, orange, beer, organic, sparkling, natural. In practice that means a wine-forward room with a deliberately loose, bar-friendly feel — a lengthy list of red, white and orange wines alongside organic and natural beers and bubbles, poured by a team used to recommending bottles rather than reciting a formal pairing menu.

05The neighbourhood

The restaurant sits in what locals call SoPi — South Pigalle — the pocket of the 9th arrondissement that has shifted from red-light reputation to a dense cluster of concept stores, cocktail bars and bistros. Pigalle metro station is a two-minute walk away on Boulevard de Clichy, and the Moulin Rouge is roughly a seven-minute walk from the hotel's front door. From the upper floors of Grand Pigalle Experimental, and in the spirit of the restaurant's own description of a meal here, diners get a glimpse of Montmartre and the Sacré-Cœur rising just beyond the rooftops.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.